Optimal Road Trip Will Generate a Trek Around the U.S. For You

Car Driving with Evergreen Trees in the Background

Photo: Vera_Petrunina/Depositphotos

Road trips are the ultimate way to explore the United States. Planes and trains can’t cover everything, but a car can, letting you see all the fascinating pockets the country has to offer. But with so much to take in, it can be overwhelming to even start planning a multi-state or cross-country trek. Dr. Randal S. Olson is here to help with his practical—and endlessly interesting—website, Optimal Road Trips.

Optimal Road Trips was built to help you plan a big road trip. It prioritizes efficiency, considering dozens of stops to create the fastest possible route. If you’re flexible and open to destinations, the site offers ready-made trips through U.S. landmarks and U.S. National Parks. Both involve hundreds of hours of driving and cover the entire country. Alternatively, you can build your own trip by picking your stops and letting the site create the fastest route.

The website was born out of a snowed-in weekend in 2015. “I decided to work out a faster way to find Waldo,” he explains to My Modern Met. “It was a fun version of the Traveling Salesman Problem, which asks for the best order to visit a set of points. Journalist Tracy Staedter then asked whether I could apply the same approach to an epic road trip across the country. Since visiting every state was already on my bucket list, I jumped at the chance. Tracy chose the landmarks, and I worked out the driving order. The map went viral, and within two weeks I was talking about it with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition.”

Olson will even create a custom trip for you. You can send him a list of stops—like stadiums, breweries, etc.—and he’ll plan the most efficient trip and send it back. He’s created some unique paths since launching the website.

“Among the routes I've worked on, Science Friday’s Ultimate Geek Road Trip was memorably unusual,” he recalls. “They collected science and technology destinations from listeners, and I optimized the route. It includes Seattle’s NOAA Sound Garden, a sculpture with pipes played by the wind. Another stop is Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 in Idaho, which used nuclear power to light four bulbs in 1951. A road trip with a nuclear reactor on the itinerary is hard to forget!”

After its launch, Optimal Road Trips exploded in popularity. Changes to Google’s mapping services, however, broke the interactive maps. But there was still interest in the original routes, and people asked Olson about new trips. He recently restored the maps and added the build-your-own feature—a frequent request before the relaunch.

Start planning your trip on the Optimal Road Trips website.