MapForums

All,

Is there a way in any recent version of MapPoint to restrict the routes to occur within a particular country?

For example, I have customers in Detroit, MI who wish to move product to Buffalo, NY. MapPoint routes the customers through Canada at a distance of 256 miles. Staying within the U.S. borders, the routing should be a distance of about 360 miles. Crossing into Canada and then back to the U.S. is not an option due to Customs and fees.

For movements within the United States, I want to restrict the routes to only occur within the United States. For Canada only movements, I would also want to restrict routes over only Canadian roads. For movements between countries, the route should only cross the border one time. Is there any way to do this?

Thanks,

Andy

At border crossings, you can put in "Avoidance polygons". That will force MapPoint not to cross the border. It it helps, you can post your PTM file (zip it first) I'll put in the avoidance polygons for you and post a screenshot to illustrate.

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Eric,

Thanks for the tip. I had not seen that before in MapPoint, and can now see how to create one manually.

Do you have any coding tips to create this avoidance polygon via VBA? I currently have all my origin and destination LATS & LONGS in an Excel file that I pass to MapPoint via VBA to calculate and obtain distances. If I separate the same country od-pairs from those requiring border crossings, I suspect I could create my "avoidance polygon" only when needed.

Regards,

Andy

I think that would be difficult, as the avoidance polygon has to be precisely over an intersection for it to work (drawing somewhere along a segment doesn't work, it has to be an intersection).

However there shouldn't be too many border crossings? I think maybe just take the time to draw the avoidance polygons and then save them in your default template.

Eric

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Thanks Eric.

I could then create one template with the avoidance polygons and one without, and have an option in the Excel spreadsheet to turn off/on border crossings to select the proper template to obtain the route distances.

Andy

That sounds like a good solution.

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