A dispatcher for a firm that we do work for prepares daily routing sheets for her drivers.  Her job would be made substantially easier if calculating driving time between points were automated.

I believe that this should be fairly straightforward but I'm not sure how to do this.  A plugin or a custom function that would be able to submit an origin address and a destination address via a script to google maps (or apple maps) that would return the calculated drive time between the two points.

We don't need driving directions or anything very complicated.  Just estimated driving time.

I'm sure this has been done by others on this forum in the past.  Thanks in advance for any suggestions that folks might have. 

This blog post gives an overview and demo of how to do this using one of Google's APIs. However, Google's terms of service prohibit using it for what you're describing without paying for an enterprise license. MapQuest has a similar service with less restrictive license terms.

Edited May 8, 201510 yr by jbante