Drive the coastline

An idea for a roadtrip:

Drive the perimeter of the United States, following the coastline to every extent possible. Take every road that borders the beach. (e.g. A1A in St. Augustine) Enter every subdivision if there is a full loop possible. No tracing back over on one way streets necessary.

I'm not sure if I'm more interested in driving it or just knowing now long this would be. It would be hard to map out on Google Maps. I'd have to drag a route onto every possible coastal street. Maybe someone who knew how to program could write a script to tell Google Maps to follow every street closest to the ocean.

Maybe make it easier, only take the closest state route to the ocean. With a day of work, I could probably could do that on my own with Google Maps.

Below is a sample of what I'm talking about. Here in a short stretch of coastline near Awendaw, South Carolina, I have found the route which follows the coastline to the extent possible.



















Actually, there could be an easier way to do this without a computer script. One could take several samples of coastline followed like seen above, and then compare it to how long it would take to cover the same distance along the coastline on a nearby highway. By comparing the two, we could have a factor of the difference. In this case, the route that follows local roads close to the coastline is 12.4 miles long (above) and the one using a highway but covering the same space is 6.8 miles long (below).
























The factor between them is 1.82. By sampling many portions of coastline around the country, and finding the difference between the nearest highway route and the coastline route, we could create an average factor for the country. Then, one would only need to find the closest highway route around the nation's perimeter, and factor it up to see how long a route along the coastline would take.

An even easier approximation would be just to see how long the interstate route is, and use the same factoring process described above. It would be faster, although less accurate.

Is this easier than a computer script? I don't know. I'm not a computer scientist. For me this would be easier. I like factors. It would be cool to do.