You can find the chainage of any spot by tapping or clicking the map. Where you tap decides whether the pin lands on the road or stays exactly where you put it.
On a computer and on a phone
- On a computer, click anywhere. The chainage card opens on the left.
- On a phone, a single tap drops a pin and shows its chainage on the pin. To open the full card, tap the pin, double-tap the map, or press and hold.
If a card is already open, a tap on the map just closes it. Tapping keeps your zoom: the map only moves if the pin would be hidden behind the card.
When the pin snaps to the road
The pin snaps onto a state-controlled road when you tap within about 10 screen pixels of it. That's roughly 15 m when you're zoomed in to street level, and up to 40 m when you're zoomed out. The card shows the badge Map point and tells you how far it moved, for example “Snapped onto the road, 6 m from where you tapped.”
For the most precise result, zoom in and tap right on the carriageway you want.
Dropped pins
Tap further from the road and the pin stays exactly where you put it. This is a Dropped pin: a cyan pin with a dotted cyan line to the nearest road, labelled with the distance. It's handy for site compounds, driveways, sign locations and anything else off the road.
The card for a dropped pin shows the road's Nearest chainage, the Pin latitude and Pin longitude, and the Distance to road.
Switch between the two
Under the chainage readout you can change your mind:
- Snap to road moves a dropped pin onto the nearest road at its chainage.
- Use dropped pin puts a snapped pin back exactly where you tapped.
Both kinds can be saved to a project. If a result looks wrong, see The chainage doesn't look right. For every field on the card, see Read the chainage card.