Using MapPoint to compute routes with locations not on the road?

Question

We use MapPoint for computing routes, but the problem is that we have locations that are not on the road like houses backyards and stuff. We work with latitude and longitude coordinates which may or may not be on the road. This may cause a lot of problems for us. How does MapPoint handle such routes? I mean what is the road distance between one house's backyard and another one? Makes no sense, right?

Thanks for any opinions

Answer 1

MapPoint looks for the closest road and then applies a straight line distance to the closest road. This works well for short driveways/etc which are not in the road database.

Note that if the distance is more than a specific amount (I'm not sure the threshold off hand), then MapPoint will report than the point is not on the road network and the route cannot be calculated.

Also it is unclear what the behavior is for your backyard example, if the two backyards are next to each other - it might simply draw a line between the two points.