How it works

Written by the person who knows the road

Phone maps send visitors to the wrong lane, the neighbour's drive or a field gate, because rural addresses are often placed by guesswork. Lanecard does not try to map anything. You write the last few miles from a landmark everyone can find, and the code does the rest.

  1. Pick a start everyone can find

    The blinking light, the four-way stop by the grain elevator, the gas station on Route 30. Visitors set their trip meter to 0.0 there.

  2. Write each step as you would say it

    Miles since the step before (to a tenth), what to do, the road name if there is a sign, and something to look for. Add a "too far" check on long stretches.

  3. Check, then share

    The card check flags missing landmarks and long stretches. Then send the phone link, print the card or paste the text.

The example from the home page

The Halvorsen place

Start at the four-way stop by the grain elevator. Set your trip meter to 0.0 there.

  1. 0.0mi Turn left onto County Road 12. Look for the grain elevator on your right.
  2. 2.3mi Turn right onto Pine Hollow Road. Look for a white church with a green roof.
  3. 3.1mi Bear left onto the gravel fork. Look for hay bales by a blue shed.
  4. 4.7mi Turn left onto the lane. Look for a red mailbox, number 4180. Too far: the one-lane bridge.
  5. 5.0mi Arrive at the yellow farmhouse.
5.0 miles · about 10 min You are there: a yellow farmhouse with a red barn behind it.

What the code works out

  • Trip-meter readings. Each step's miles are added from the start, in tenths, so 2.3 then 0.8 reads 2.3 then 3.1.
  • Distance and rough time. The total, and the minutes at 30 mph, a fair back-road average.
  • The card check. A turn with no landmark, a stretch over 3.0 miles with no "too far" check, a step with no distance, a last step that is not "Arrive", no description of the place.
  • Three formats. A phone page, print layouts and a plain-text version, all from the one card.

Private by design

No account and no email. You get two links: one to share, one to edit. The card database keeps only a scrambled fingerprint of the edit link, so we cannot recover it for you (the edit link is a page address, so it does appear in the web server logs, like every page visited). Card pages are never listed or offered to search engines. Cards nobody opens or edits for 400 days are deleted.

Make a card