Shift Route to Side of RoadFORUMS HOME SEARCH FORUMS

We're pleased to announce another awesome new route editing tool that we've added to our already extensive route planning toolbox - a Shift Route tool that enables you to shift a route left or right to place it at the side of the road, rather than down the middle.

Shifting a route to the side of the road provides multiple benefits, including:

• you can see the path of the route more clearly where sections of it overlap;
  
  
• GPS devices are less likely to get confused when navigating out and back routes;
  
  
• distance measurements are likely to be more accurate, as they reflect more real-world navigation of routes;
  
  
• editing a route with overlapping sections is easier when they are separated.

The new tool is very powerful but also extremely simple to use, giving you an unrivalled level of control for route planning.

It's available to all plotaroute.com users on both the desktop site and our mobile app - look for the Shift Route icon  in the route planner toolbar (or toolbox on the mobile app). We recommend that you use the tool after you've finished plotting your route, rather than during plotting, so that it's applied equally to the whole route.

For step by step instructions on using this new feature, please see our guide on How To Shift A Route Left Or Right To The Side Of The Road

We hope you'll find this latest new feature useful.

A very nice addition to the Toolbox, thanks!

The guide and advice is to complete a route and then apply the tool. This works great for out-backs etc, but not for repeated (overlapping sections). However, when plotting, it can be used to achieve this, for example, but shift the route before the second overlapping loop is plotted:

[IMAGE REMOVED DUE TO SIZE]

However, a second application of the shift for, say, another overlapping loop, would also be applied to the first one. That could get messy.

Is it possible to select a part of a plotted route and apply the shift tool? That would be REALLY REALLY useful!

Mark

Great adding:)

Thanks for the feedback. We might be able to add an additional option to select just part of a route to apply the shift to. As always, it's a difficult balance between sophistication and ease of use.

"As always, it's a difficult balance between sophistication and ease of use."

Agreed: but it would  the bees knees!

and still be easy to use, just like the "Delete Section" process ...... select start/end then apply the Shift tool .....

Ref. another post, https://www.plotaroute.com/posts/1328/D/1

If the "select part of the route" is implemented, then it would also be possible to "colour each loop differently". :)

Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into adding an option to apply the route shift to just a selected section of the route. This should help cater for repeated loops and any other scenario where you want to apply the route shift differently to different secttions. This wouldn't make it possible to apply different colours to different sections of the route though I'm afraid.

Understood. I think the "selection" update would meet most requirements!

Further to the suggestions below, we've amended this new feature so that you can just shift part of a route if you like rather than the whole route. This provides significantly more flexibility when using this tool, allowing you to shift different sections, by different amounts, in different directions, at different times!  

Please note though, that we've only added this additional option to the desktop site, as we think this level of complexity would be too fiddly to use on a mobile device. 

Excellent, thank you very much for such a fast response!!

As an example, image on left is the original Shift (see below), middle is applying one shift left, one shift right, right is aniother right shift. As you say, very flexible!

[IMAGE REMOVED DUE TO SIZE]

I agree, the mobile addition would not really be appropriate.

Note: some arrows and the red line are from a Trace, they confuse the images somewhat but you get the point!

That's better
[IMAGE REMOVED DUE TO SIZE]

This should be very handy for both plotting with overlaps and for following the route.  There have been occasions when my GPS app wasn't sure which way I was supposed to be going.

I'll give it a go when the weather improves ...