Drive Escape
Pick a city and see, district by district, how far you can drive for a weekend escape.
- Category
- Tools & Utilities
- Platforms
- Web
- Pricing
- Free and open source (MIT licence)
Overview
Drive Escape is an experimental weekend road-trip planner. You type in the city you live in, and the site draws a driving-time map around it: nearby districts are coloured green, distant ones shade towards red, and each district is labelled with its name, its estimated drive time and its distance. The goal is to answer one practical question quickly: "Where can we reach by car without spending the whole weekend on the road?"
Most map apps are built for a trip you have already chosen. You enter a destination and get a route. Weekend planning usually starts the other way round. You know roughly how long you are willing to drive and you want ideas. Drive Escape works the way people tend to think, starting from a time budget, so you can scan a whole region at once instead of checking destinations one at a time. The project describes its range as up to about five hours of driving.
Drive times come from the open-source OSRM routing engine, and the map uses Leaflet and OpenStreetMap with administrative boundaries from open data sources. Results are cached locally so a city you have already searched reloads quickly. The site works in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Japanese, and supports cities in many countries, including Japan, Europe, Australia and Taiwan. The full source code is published under the MIT licence.
Treat the numbers as planning estimates. They come from a routing model, not live traffic, so holiday congestion, road works, mountain roads and weather can make a real trip noticeably longer.
Key features
Search any city
Enter a city name and the site geocodes it and generates a driving-time map centred on it. A list of popular cities offers a quick starting point.
District-level heatmap
Surrounding districts are filled with a ten-step colour scale from green (close) to red (far), so you can see the shape of your reachable area at a glance rather than a simple circle.
Drive time and distance labels
Each district on the map is labelled with its name, the estimated driving time and the distance from your starting point, which makes it easy to shortlist places that fit your time budget.
Open routing data with local cache
Drive times are calculated with the OSRM table service on OpenStreetMap data, and results are cached in your browser so repeat searches load almost instantly.
Multilingual and mobile friendly
The interface is available in four languages and is designed to work on a phone, so you can explore options on the sofa as easily as at a desk.
How to use Drive Escape
- Open drive-escape.pomodiary.com in a browser and choose your language from the selector.
- Type your home city into the search box, or pick one from the popular cities list.
- Wait a moment while district boundaries and driving times load; the first search for a city takes longest.
- Read the colour bands: green and yellow districts are realistic for a day trip or a relaxed weekend, while orange and red ones usually suit a longer break.
- Zoom in on districts that look interesting and read their labelled drive time and distance, and note two or three candidates.
- Check each candidate in your usual navigation app for current traffic, tolls and road conditions before you leave, and plan rest stops for anything over two hours.
Who it’s for
- City dwellers looking for weekend getaway ideas within a fixed driving budget.
- Families who want to keep car time short for children and need to compare several nearby areas.
- People who have just moved to a new city and want a quick sense of what is within reach.
- Developers and map enthusiasts interested in an open-source example built on OSRM, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap.
FAQ
- Does Drive Escape cost anything?
- No. The site is free to use and the source code is open under the MIT licence.
- Are the drive times based on live traffic?
- No. They are routing estimates from OSRM using OpenStreetMap road data. Real journeys can take longer because of traffic, weather, roadworks or slow mountain roads, so add a margin and check a navigation app on the day.
- Why does the map show districts rather than a circle?
- Roads, rivers and mountains mean equal straight-line distances can take very different amounts of time to drive. Colouring real administrative areas by drive time gives a more honest picture of where you can actually reach.
- Does it work outside China?
- Yes. The project supports cities in many regions, including Japan, Europe, Australia and Taiwan. Coverage depends on the open boundary and road data available for each area.
- Why is the first search slow?
- The site has to download boundary data and calculate driving times for many districts. Results are then cached locally, so searching the same city again is much faster.
Guides and articles
- How to Plan a Weekend Road Trip by Drive Time, Not Distance
Plan weekend getaways using drive-time rings instead of kilometres: choosing 2, 3 or 4-hour radiuses, managing fatigue, packing and budgeting the trip.
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Questions about Drive Escape? Email hi@pomodiary.com or visit our contact page.