Training pills — Ep 3. — Address geocoding

This tutorial uses Highway, the platform that became Routal Planner in 2021. Today's screens look different.

We know how hard your day to day is. Planning routes is a tedious job that requires a lot of concentration and experience. From Routal.com we want to help you, that's why we launched a series of training pills to help you improve day by day. Our goal is for you to plan better, faster and more successfully. Shall we start?

In today's post, we'll talk about one of the biggest problems: georeferencing, or Geocoding in English. This term refers to being able to convert a written address into coordinates (GPS) on a map.

This fact, which may seem so trivial and obvious, is a very complicated process indeed. How many times has Google Maps taken you to the wrong place? In my personal case, dozens if not hundreds of times. And I have a personal anecdote, in the middle of the Swiss Alps, snowing and carrying a heavy suitcase, I sent my wife and me to the other end of town. That's a long time ago, but I'll never forget it...

This anecdote cannot happen in your daily life. Your business depends on it. Luckily your delivery people know the areas well and have no problem getting to the places. (A secret, they were lost many times before and now they have already learned 😉)

How can we better geolocate?

Very simple, following a few small formatting tricks depending on the place you want to geolocate. These are our recommendations after working with all of these countries and finding a way to be the most successful.

By following this recommendation, you will achieve much more success when it comes to geolocation, either by manually uploading your addresses or by importing them in bulk using an XLSX file.

Bonus track — Importing GPS coordinates on Highway

The world of geocoding changes radically when we have the GPS coordinates of the places we want to go to. In this case, the concept is called reverse-geocoding, or reverse georeferencing, which tries to convert GPS coordinates into a street and a number. This work is very simple on the part of map systems and the error is usually minimal.

The good news is that you can use GPS coordinates directly on the Highway platform and our system will do the reverse geocoding for you.

We simply have to copy the coordinates following this format:

Latitude, longitude 41.387021, 2.170123

It is important to keep the decimal separator with the dot and the separator between latitude and longitude with a comma. This is the Anglo-Saxon format, which we will find in most map systems (Google Maps, HERE, OSM,...).

We hope it was useful and we look forward to seeing you next week!