You've got a new job—to drive Oakridge Estates and toss the Oakridge Gazette into every driveway from your bicycle. You’re paid $20/mile in quarter-mile increments. You start and end at the corner of Cayo Grande Court and Calle Clara Vista (see lower left corner of the yellow rectangle below). How much do you make?
(a) $45, (b) $55, (c) $65, (d) $75?
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Oakridge Gazette Paper Route |
(c) $65. The route is 3.25 miles long.
For the curious, here's how I calculated this distance.
I went to the Online Mapping page of the Thousand Oaks website,
which has changed since 2006, so the information that follows is no longer
available. Today, however, online mapping may be found at this web address:
https://www.toaks.org/about-us/about-thousand-oaks/online-mapping.
Click on and when the following
window appears, enter your street address in the
empty box and press Enter:
If the address is valid, a window with the address and parcel number will appear. Click on the address. A map showing the parcel location will appear.
To enhance the view, do the following:
Note the symbols at the top of the page:
You will ordinarily use only the four that are underlined above in red. Click on one to select it and activate the corresponding function:
A host of other functions are activated by right-clicking the mouse. Here's how you might measure the distance of the Oakridge Gazette route. You can use the same technique to measure accurate distances (even to the nearest fraction of a foot depending on the zoom level) anywhere in the area the map covers.
Your calculated distance will vary from someone else's, because everyone will measure slightly differently. For the distance above, ride your "bike" only on the streets, stay as close as possible to the center of every street, and go to the very end of every cul-de-sac.
Still, if you ask 10 people to measure the distance, you'll likely get 10 answers. The answer of 3.25 miles is not necessarily the exact answer. This is just a puzzle designed to engage you and perhaps expose you to a cool tool.
Although there is more than one route though the tract, there is no one best route. The tract layout requires that you backtrack on every cul-de-sac, on the segment of Las Colinas between Calle Buena Vista and Cayo Grande Court, and on the segment of Lesser Drive between the end of Calle Alta Vista and Calle Mazatlán.
You may come up with a distance under 3.25 miles, perhaps as low as 3.00 miles. However, the person who has hired you is very generous, and is willing to pay you based upon the higher estimate, because he wants to retain you. You may be delivering the Gazette today, but tomorrow you'll be writing stories for it, and perhaps someday you'll be managing editor!