Road Distances in Australia

Published by: smith 2009-01-07

Invasive Strategy: Toads Hit the Road | LiveScience::
In jokes, the chicken only crosses the road. In Australia, cane toads use roads to travel. are well-suited for animals traveling long distances and the
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I am looking for a distance grid that gives the approximate ROAD distance (i.e. NOT 'as the crow flies') between: 1)each pair of postcodes in mainland Australia 2)each pair of postcodes in Tasmania in the following format: 2000 2010 10 km 2001 2010 300 km etc... Note that I do not need both 2000 to 2001 and vice versa, I am assuming the to and fro distances will be very similar. Ideally, this should be from the center of each postcode area but a margin of error (say 10%) is acceptable from large or unregularly shaped rural postcode areas. There are roughly 16,500 postcodes in Australia, so doing this manually on things like 'whereis' or 'mapquest' was not an option. I am therefore hoping someone can generate this in an automated fashion...

Hi Scriptor I was aware of this provider (and a couple of others). It was the fact that these datasets are way too expensive for what I intended to use it for that prompted me to ask this question. Since distance info is 'free' on a one-to-one basis (everyone can look up a road distance on whereis), I thought there might be a way to generate these automatically. Thanks for your effort and sorry if this was not clear from the question - I was actually after the dataset itself (which is why I put a fairly high price on it), not where I might buy it.

Dear johnywalker, Unfortunately, I could not find any indications that a data collection of this kind is available from a free source. However, I did not expect that such data is available free of charge, given the huge amount of work and calculations it takes to create. But I found exactly the kind of data you are looking for, available from a commerical source. The Australian company FindMap, a provider of location data, offers a data collection with the road distances between any two valid Australian postcodes, as of October 2005. The total number of postcode combinations exceeds 5 million. The data is in CSV format, which can be imported into databases and applications. For details about FindMap's Australian Postcode Distance Table, please refer to: FindMap Pty. Ltd. 60 Wilkinson St Berrima, NSW 2577 Australia -- Phone: +61 (0)2 4877 2400 Fax: +61 (0)2 4877 2399 E-Mail: info@findmap.com.au Website: http://www.findmap.com.au/ Hope this is what you need! Best regards, Scriptor

I specifically asked for a dataset, NOT for a company who sells this sort of stuff. If I wanted someone to do a basic internet lookup to find a supplier who sells this commercially (which I incidentally had already done and which turned up the same supplier he did), I would not have offered $200... Although I thought I had phrased the question correctly to reflect this, I accept that I might not have been sufficiently stressed this and might therefore have left some scope for ambiguity. Although Scriptor agreed that he did not answer the actual request, I would like to pay him $10 for his efforts as a goodwill gesture, and I the would therefore request a credit of $190 and that you close of the question herewith. Please ignore the email I sent previously on the same request, I was not aware of the correct procedure to do this.

I now see that my answer is indeed not what you had in mind, and I'm terribly sorry. In the meantime, I have done additional research because I was hoping to find similar data available for free or at a modest price; but alas, without any results. Of course, if you are dissatisfied you don't have to pay for this answer. In that case, please use this form to request a full refund: http://answers.google.com/answers/refundrequest Please accept my aplogies. Regards, Scriptor