Split a Long Drive Into Legs You Can Actually Finish
Every long drive starts with the same optimistic number — 'it's only nine hours' — and ends with a tired driver at 11pm. This takes your total distance, your average speed, and the daily cap you're actually willing to drive, then splits it into legs, punches in rest stops on an interval you set, and flags any day that still breaks the cap. Local only; the plan never leaves the tab.
- Legs
- Total distance split against your daily cap, in your tab
- local
- What it replaces
- One optimistic duration from a mapping app
- $0.00
- Input
- Distance, average speed, daily cap, rest interval
- no card
- Output
- Day-by-day legs with stops and arrival times
- recomputed
What you pay otherwise
| Route | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Driving it in one push | Fatigue, a late arrival, and a lost first morning | real risk |
| An unplanned overnight | A motorway hotel booked at 10pm rates | $140+ |
| Guessing the split | Day one too long, day three too short | a bad week |
| This page | Capped legs with stops and arrival times | $0 |
The workflow
Enter the distance you'll actually drive
Total road distance, not the straight line between the two towns. If the mapping app says 1,180 km, use 1,180 — the leg lengths inherit whatever you enter.
Set the daily cap to the number you'll honour
Six hours is a comfortable day for most drivers with children; eight is a long one. The cap is what makes the plan honest: set it to nine and the tool will happily hand you back a nine-hour day one.
Use a realistic average speed, not the speed limit
Motorway limits assume no traffic, no fuel stops, and no roadworks. An average of 85 km/h on a 130 km/h motorway is closer to what a full day produces, and it stops every arrival estimate being optimistic.
Read the flagged days before you book accommodation
Any leg over the cap is marked, and the strip shows why — usually a remainder day that couldn't be split evenly. Move the split point rather than accepting the flagged leg.
Worked example
Sample: 1,180 km at 85 km/h, 6 h/day cap Legs 3 Day 1 510 km · 6h 00m · 2 stops Day 2 510 km · 6h 00m · 2 stops Day 3 160 km · 1h 53m · 0 stops Rest interval every 2h 00m Uploaded nothing — split in the tab
Numbers above are sample data produced by the tool's own pre-loaded example, run in the browser — not averages or measured benchmarks.
What breaks this
Using the speed limit as your average makes every arrival estimate optimistic by 20–30%. Setting the daily cap to what you hope for rather than what you'll honour just moves the fatigue into the plan. Forgetting that the last leg is a remainder — an uneven final day is arithmetic, not a bug; move the split point if it's too short to be worth a hotel.
Try it now
A 1,180 km drive at an 85 km/h average with a 6-hour cap is loaded and splits into three legs. Raise the cap to 9 hours and watch it collapse into two.
Open the leg splitter →Go deeper: the printable strip
The leg plan is free forever. The $4 one-time tier adds:
- Printable strip — the whole route on one dashboard sheet — estimate: ~10 min saved versus copying legs into a note.
- Saved trips shelf — keep up to 8 routes in this browser — estimate: ~12 min saved on the return leg.
- Overnight checklist — a per-leg arrival pack — estimate: ~8 min saved per stop of re-checking times.