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.

This wasn’t a complete overhaul, as we are focusing our efforts on the upcoming version, but I think it’s quite a bit nicer than before. Overall, it just feels less clunky.

Under the hood, nothing has changed. For example, for the Portland region, we’re still using data from 2004 (with some updates), but that should be changing fairly soon–hopefully within the next month or so.

Please check it out and let us know what you think.

For those that don’t know about this, after you click on the map, you can use the keyboard to navigate. You can use the arrow keys to move the map continuously; the page up, page down, home, and end keys to move in larger steps; and the + and – keys to zoom in and out.