The Most Optimal Road Trip Maps

In 1954, a landmark paper in computer science famously solved the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) by proving the exact, shortest route to visit all 48 contiguous state capitals plus Washington D.C. The underlying puzzle is deceptively simple: given a list of destinations, what is the shortest possible route that visits each location once before returning to the start? 

That breakthrough kicked off a long tradition of mathematical road trips, inspiring some wonderfully bizarre optimal road trip maps of the United States:

• Casino Road Trip plots the optimal route to visit all 835 casinos in the United States. The resulting journey covers 33,826 miles and would take around 31 days to complete - although I suspect you'll run out of money long before you reach the final stop.


• Randy Olson's Optimal Road Trip Across the U.S. tackles a more scenic challenge, calculating the shortest possible route that visits 50 of America's best-known landmarks.


• The Best Brewery Road Trip Ever optimizes an itinerary around 71 of the highest-rated breweries in the United States. The route spans nearly 12,000 miles - remember that if you're attempting it for real, make sure that your designated driver stays sober.


• The Optimal County Tour visits every county in the United States. This is a journey of 93,466 miles, taking in 3,100 county seats.


• The Traveling Tesla Salesman visualizes the optimal route around all 196 Tesla superchargers in the U.S. (originally published in 2015 - so there are probably a few more now).

Ready to build your own?

If these epic itineraries have inspired you to plot your own optimal road trip, you don't need a supercomputer to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem today. Several modern web mapping APIs and open-source libraries can handle the heavy lifting for you:

• GraphHopper Route Optimization - a fast, web-based routing engine that takes a matrix of coordinates and returns fully optimized turn-by-turn routes across global road networks.


• Openrouteservice Optimization - an open-source vehicle routing engine powered by OpenStreetMap data. It solves complex TSP and multi-stop routing problems in milliseconds, making it ideal for pairing with front-end mapping libraries like MapLibre GL JS or Leaflet.


• Google OR-Tools - Google's open-source suite for combinatorial optimization. If you want to customize your constraints - like forcing specific stopovers, driver breaks, or time windows - OR-Tools can help calculate the optimal sequence before passing coordinates to your map renderer.