Submitting a route

This site is built on measurements. Every distance was produced by a routing engine or driven, terminal to town centre. Every coordinate names its source. Every page carries the date it was last checked. A route you submit enters the site the same way or not at all — and this page exists so that when we say no, you can see it was the rules that said it.

What a route is

One path a traveller actually makes, from wherever they start: an airport, a ferry terminal or wharf, or the town they are staying in. It never starts at a private property. A host's own site can pin its place on our embedded map; our pages start at the town.

The destination is a place. The test: would a traveller with no relationship to any business still make this drive? The ski hill passes — it is the reason for the trip. A town, a park, a trailhead, a ferry terminal all pass. A cabin, a restaurant, a shop — anyone's front door, including our clients' — does not.

That rule is not a limitation on operators; it is what makes a route worth linking to. A route ends at the town, so it serves every operator in that town. We will not build anyone a private road — the public road helps you and your neighbours.

Listing is not recommending

Route pages do carry businesses — where you could sleep at the end of the drive, where the map records food along it — and that is not a hole in the rule above. A business cannot be the reason for a drive. A business can be a fact about one.

Those blocks come from OpenStreetMap and claim only a distance. They are never "all of them" or "the good ones". The headline is the longest stretch of road with nothing mapped on it, because a traveller can plan around that.

We list, we never rank. A place appears because the open map records it within two kilometres of the drive, in the order you pass it. Recommendations belong to the town's own site. Nobody can pay to appear, because the open data compiles the list and anyone can correct it.

Local car hosts

The car rental guide lists private hosts who rent cars at the airports. A host is listed when they deliver to Gander, Deer Lake or St. John's airport and have a public Turo listing we can link. The link goes to that listing, never to a phone number. We show no prices and no availability: the listing has them.

Listing is free and nobody can pay for it. Write to the address below with your listing; we check it and decide. A host whose listing lapses or stops delivering to the door comes off. Rental companies are different: we name those only as each airport's own page names them.

What we need from you

Not measurements — verifying is our job, and we re-measure everything regardless of what is submitted. What we need is the case:

• Where from, where to, and the roads you would actually take.
• Why travellers make this drive — what is at the end of it, in a sentence or two. If the answer is "my business is there," see the place test. If the answer is "the icebergs come through in May," now we are talking.
• What is worth stopping for on the way, if you know the road. Local knowledge is the one part we cannot measure our way to.
• Anything volatile a traveller would need — a ferry schedule, a seasonal closure — as a link to whoever keeps it current. We link volatile facts; we do not copy them, because a copied schedule is a wrong schedule by August.

What gets a route accepted

• It serves real arrival travel — people fly in and make this drive.
• The distance survives our own measurement.
• Every claimed activity has evidence behind it — an icebergs tag needs the province to name the place a viewing spot; a hiking tag needs a named trail.
• Photographs come with a licence, a credit and a source, or they do not come at all.

What gets one declined

• A destination that fails the place test.
• A path drawn to route travellers past somewhere rather than to somewhere.
• Claims we cannot verify from a source that is not you.
• A drive nobody makes.

A decline comes with the nearest route we would accept, where one exists — we cannot route to your door, but a route to your town may well clear the bar, and it serves you along with everyone else there.

What acceptance means

An accepted route becomes ours editorially. We write the page, we maintain it on our verification cycle, and we change it when the road or the facts change — including in ways a submitter might not prefer. Credit for the suggestion is given if you want it. We accept what clears the bar, as capacity allows.

Acceptance cannot be bought. Sponsorship can fund the work of filling a gap — and where it does, the page says so — but it cannot buy a yes. Sponsors see no draft and approve no copy. No invoice of any kind moves a route past these rules.

And it cannot choose the gap either. The rule above stops a cheque buying a yes. It does not, on its own, stop something quieter: a sponsor mentions what they would like to see covered, the ask appears here the following week looking like any other, and the commission that follows is clean at every step. So the gap has to be on the published wanted list, put there by the ordinary unpaid editorial process, before any sponsor is approached — both dates written down, and the build refuses to publish a commission where they run the wrong way round. Money can fill a gap it did not create.

The money pays for the work, not the result. A commissioned contributor is paid whether or not the work is published, and a sponsor gets no refund on a decline, so a "no" never becomes a negotiation.

And whoever decides was never told who paid. A commissioned photograph is judged by the same criteria as an unpaid one, by somebody who does not know which it is.

Today that list opens photographs to funding and nothing else. Not a route: none is on the list, and an offer to pay will not put one there. Not a mapping ask: paid editing on OpenStreetMap is for that community to rule on. Not local knowledge or a recorded track: paying for an answer buys the bias the ask exists to avoid.

Routes and directions are different things

We also build private door-to-door directions for accommodation operators' own booking pages — the last leg from the public road to a guest's actual destination. Those are directions, not routes: they are made for a guest who has already booked, they carry no recommendation, and they never appear on this site. This site's routes are never for sale, and its pages end at places.

How to submit

Email us the case — the origin, the destination, and why travellers make the drive. We read everything; we accept what clears the bar; and if it does not, we will tell you which line it fell at.