How it decides

A map made of two numbers per stop.

Around Town never asks for an address. Each stop is placed by which way it is from home and how many minutes' drive it is. That is enough to sketch your town around your front door and work out a sensible loop.

Drive times

From home to a stop, and back, takes the minutes you entered. Between two stops the planner measures the straight line between where they sit on that map, adds 20% because roads bend, and never uses more than going back past home. Two stops at the same place (same direction, same minutes) are a one-minute walk apart. These are estimates from your numbers; there is no live traffic.

Hours, appointments and cold food

• Hours: a stop must be finished before it closes. Arriving before it opens means waiting, and the run sheet shows the wait.
• Appointments: a stop with an appointment starts at that minute. Arrive early and you wait; arrive late and it cannot be done.
• Cold, keep for last: once a cold stop is done, only other cold stops can follow it, then home.
• Home by: if you set it, no run that gets you home later is considered.

Choosing the order

For up to 10 stops the planner checks every possible order (with a method that skips orders already beaten, so it is exact and quick). It keeps the run that does the most stops, and among those the one that has you home soonest. If a stop cannot fit, the run leaves it out and says why: it closes before you could get there, it cannot be done by your home-by time, or it clashes with the others.

Best time to leave Run Pass

Give an earliest and a latest leave time, up to six hours apart. The planner plans the whole run for each quarter hour in that window and picks the leave time that does the most stops, then the shortest time out of the house, then the earliest. The table of every time it tried is shown with the answer.

The planner does not know any place's real hours, roads or traffic, and it is not a navigation app. It works out an order from what you tell it.

Try it with the example