Lay out route by highway number

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum and this is my first post. I hope this is going to the wish list for Streets & Trips section.

I would like to be able to plan a route by telling S & T a series of road numbers to get me from start to finish. For example, from Napa to the Getty Museum in LA, I would like to be able to route from Trancas Street to SR 29 to SR 12 to I-80 to I-680 to i-580 to i-505 to I-5 to I-405 to the museum parking lot.

In planning long distance motorcycle rides, I usually know which roads I want to take but often, if I get the program to use my desired route by entering pushpins or waypoints, the program wants me to get off the highway at the way point and then get back on, which is irritating when driving the route.

I have asked in other forums whether there is any way to use route numbers to lay out the route, but no one has shown me how to do it if there is a way.

If anyone here knows how to tell S & T to route this way, I would love to find out it's doable now. If not, this would be my wish list. Mick

Welcome to the forum, Mick.

I think I understand your problem, but perhaps not. I found that S&T plotted the route according to your stated preferences above just by starting at Trancas Street in Napa and ending at the Getty without adding any stops or waypoints. Whatever you do, though, I would not fully trust any navigation program to just get it right automatically; I think you should follow the projected route on the map and in the driving directions to assure that it is going the way you want.

If you did want to insert your own waypoints in the form of road names or numbers S&T can sub-optimize. For instance, if you do a search for "I-80" and add that to the route, S&T will pick some unhelpful point on I-80 half-way to Reno. Therefore, you don't want to do that. I would rather start with the route start and end points only and then just drag the route to the highways you prefer. To avoid having waypoints where you don't want them as you describe, just click on them and move them to where you want. Certainly, if a waypoint is off the road, drag it back on. Also, I find dragging the waypoint to the end of a road segment (just before the next turn off the road segment it is on) will give you the cleanest directions.

Hi Mick, and welcome to the forum. I addition to the above suggestions by SpadesFlush you may also read the following topic, which deals with the issue of placing Stops on highways: Long standing Routing bug still in Microsoft Streets and Trips 2010

I agree with Mick on this suggestion. This year we are taking the Natchez Trace Parkway from Natchez MS to Nashville, TN. Unless you literally put hundreds of route points, the program will almost always take you off the highway - including using shortest route, etc. I finally gave up and just downloaded a gpx file with lots of points of interest [literallty over 100] and the program finally did follow the route.

Tom