Today, inspired by a recent donation*, I finally got around to speeding up the display of long route lines (i.e., the line marking a route on the trip planner map). Previously, long route lines would take a long time to show up, and when a line was too long, it just wouldn’t show up at all, possibly crashing the user’s browser. Obviously not good.

What happened was, I got notification of a donation and saw that the person making the donation lives in Beaverton. I tried getting a route from Beaverton to downtown Portland, but the route never came up because the line was too long. I felt bad that someone had made a donation but might not even be able to get directions over a relatively short distance, so I got to work on fixing the problem.

So, skipping over the technical aspects, I’ll just say that now it should be possible to get a route of just about any length. It still takes a while to generate a really long route, but once the route info gets back to the user’s browser, the line drawing is almost instantaneous. Even for short routes there’s a noticeable speedup.

This has been bugging me for a long time, so I’m glad it’s finally fixed. As usual, if you notice any problems, please let us know.

* Big thanks to Rebecca in Beaverton.