How MiddlePoint works out a fair meeting point
Most tools that look for a meeting point drop a pin in the middle of the map, halfway as the crow flies. It is easy to compute, and it is almost always unfair. MiddlePoint works in real travel time instead. Here is how.
Why the middle of the map doesn't work
Two people 200 kilometres apart do not face the same journey, because the roads between them are not the same. If one comes down a motorway and the other along back roads, the point 100 kilometres from each costs the second one twenty or thirty extra minutes. The point is geometrically right and humanly wrong. The question is not "where is the middle?" but "where do we arrive at the same time?".
Two people: half the time, not half the distance
For two addresses, MiddlePoint works out the real route from one to the other in the chosen mode of transport, then walks along that route to the point where half the travel time has elapsed. The result follows the road, inherits its detours and its slow stretches, and rarely lands where a compass would have put it. It is the point you both reach after the same number of minutes.
Three or more: search, measure, repeat
From three participants onwards there is no single point along a route, so the answer has to be searched for. MiddlePoint starts from a central area, lays a hexagonal ring of candidate points around it, and measures every participant's travel time to each candidate. The best candidate becomes the new centre, the ring tightens, and the process repeats until the search stops improving.
What "best" means here
A point is not chosen because it minimises the total of all journeys — that measure always favours the majority and sacrifices whoever lives out of the way. MiddlePoint scores each candidate on two things at once: the longest journey in the group, and the gap between the longest and the shortest. Shrinking the first pulls the venue towards whoever comes from furthest away; shrinking the second stops one person driving for an hour while everyone else drives for ten minutes. The chosen point is the one that holds both best.
On public transport: a real station, never a pin on a map
On public transport, a meeting point in the middle of a park or a roundabout is useless. So MiddlePoint only ever suggests real stations served by the network, and checks that each one is genuinely reachable by everyone. When several stations work, they are offered together: it is for the group to choose between the fastest and the best placed.
On a road trip: the detour is counted in minutes
Roadtrip mode does not look for a meeting point but for stops along an A → B journey. Suggestions are ranked by the time they add to the trip, not by their straight-line distance to the route: a petrol station three kilometres off the motorway but two junctions away costs more than a village slightly further out but directly on the road.
And then: places, not coordinates
A meeting point is only worth having if there is something there. Once the point is worked out, MiddlePoint pulls up the places open around it — restaurants, cafés, parks, things to do — and ranks them by how close they are to the point and by what you are after. You leave with an address to go to, not a latitude and a longitude.
Try it with your own addresses
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