I am looking for a distance grid that gives the approximate ROAD
distance (i.e. NOT 'as the crow flies') between:

1)each pair of postcodes in mainland Australia
2)each pair of postcodes in Tasmania

in the following format:

2000 2010 10 km
2001 2010 300 km
etc... 

Note that I do not need both 2000 to 2001 and vice versa, I am
assuming the to and fro distances will be very similar.

Ideally, this should be from the center of each postcode area but a
margin of error (say 10%) is acceptable from large or unregularly
shaped rural postcode areas. There are roughly 16,500 postcodes in
Australia, so doing this manually on things like 'whereis' or
'mapquest' was not an option. I am therefore hoping someone can
generate this in an automated fashion...

Dear johnywalker,

Unfortunately, I could not find any indications that a data collection
of this kind is available from a free source. However, I did not
expect that such data is available free of charge, given the huge
amount of work and calculations it takes to create.

But I found exactly the kind of data you are looking for, available
from a commerical source. The Australian company FindMap, a provider
of location data, offers a data collection with the road distances
between any two valid Australian postcodes, as of October 2005. The
total number of postcode combinations exceeds 5 million. The data is
in CSV format, which can be imported into databases and applications.

For details about FindMap's Australian Postcode Distance Table, please refer to:

FindMap Pty. Ltd.
60 Wilkinson St
Berrima, NSW 2577
Australia
--
Phone: +61 (0)2 4877 2400
Fax: +61 (0)2 4877 2399
E-Mail: info@findmap.com.au
Website: http://www.findmap.com.au/

Hope this is what you need!
Best regards,
Scriptor

---

Request for Answer Clarification by johnywalker-ga on 25 Apr 2006 16:06 PDT

Hi Scriptor

I was aware of this provider (and a couple of others). It was the fact
that these datasets are way too expensive for what I intended to use
it for that prompted me to ask this question.

Since distance info is 'free' on a one-to-one basis (everyone can look
up a road distance on whereis), I thought there might be a way to
generate these automatically.

Thanks for your effort and sorry if this was not clear from the
question - I was actually after the dataset itself (which is why I put
a fairly high price on it), not where I might buy it.

---

Clarification of Answer by scriptor-ga on 27 Apr 2006 09:45 PDT

I now see that my answer is indeed not what you had in mind, and I'm
terribly sorry.

In the meantime, I have done additional research because I was hoping
to find similar data available for free or at a modest price; but
alas, without any results.

Of course, if you are dissatisfied you don't have to pay for this
answer. In that case, please use this form to request a full refund:
http://answers.google.com/answers/refundrequest

Please accept my aplogies.
Regards,
Scriptor

I specifically asked for a dataset, NOT for a company who sells this
sort of stuff. If I wanted someone to do a basic internet lookup to
find a supplier who sells this commercially (which I incidentally had
already done and which
turned up the same supplier he did), I would not have offered $200...

Although I thought I had phrased the question correctly to reflect
this, I accept that I might not have been sufficiently stressed this
and might therefore have left some scope for ambiguity.

Although Scriptor agreed that he did not answer the actual request, I
would like to pay him $10 for his efforts as a goodwill gesture, and I
the would therefore request a credit of $190 and that you close of the
question herewith.

Please ignore the email I sent previously on the same request, I was
not aware of the correct procedure to do this.