A Cool Way to Meet in the Middle and Cut Driving
by Jaymi Heimbuch, Central Coast, California on 10. 8.08
Meeting half way is an old concept for cutting down the distance two people have to travel to get to one another. With everyone warily eyeballing gas prices and taking up bikes or a good pair of shoes as a preferable mode of transportation, shortening the travel distance and meeting half way seems even more appealing.
But how do you pick where to meet, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the area? There’s a cool website that does the work for you and makes meeting in the middle more of an adventure.
Meetways.com lets users enter in two addresses plus the type of place where two people would want to converge. So say you’re trying to get together with a client from across town and you’d like to talk over coffee. Enter in your two addresses and “coffee” and Meetways figures out the exact middle point, then gives you coffee shops surrounding that point. Users can find a favorite place that’s equidistant, or discover a place they’ve never tried before to make it an adventurous outing.
I tried it with two businesses across town from each other, where I’d have to bike five miles to get from one to the other. I typed in “coffee,” and it gave me four coffee shops right smack at halfway, each around two and a half miles from each business. It also gave me addresses, phone numbers and direction options for each coffee shop.
Shortening the distance between two places makes the idea of walking, biking, or taking the bus more doable to more people, and websites or phone apps that help out with reducing travel time, cost, and carbon footprints are awesome.
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seems like a good idea for splitting the costs of travelling to meet...but unless shortening the distance really does encourage alternate means of transportation, the total amount travelled is still going to be the same..cool way to use google maps though.
I tried it for a halfway between my home and a friend who lives about 25 miles away. The halfway point listed is Pompton Lakes, NJ (which is correct), but results for coffee were only listed in Manhattan.
When I tried the same two points, and searched for "park", I thought I'd get results for the many state and county parks in the area, instead I got Park City, UT. I'm a bit disappointed, but Google searching points in the area surrounding a point isn't that hard; neither is figuring out the halfway point via map on one's own.
@mitrenegade: Yeah, and in fact if both people were driving, two cold starts would be worse than just one, no?
That said, it's a great idea if both parties are biking/walking/Rollerblading/whatever...