We present an O(n^1.5)-space distance oracle for directed planar graphs that answers distance queries in O( n) time. Our oracle both significantly simplifies and significantly improves the recent oracle of Cohen-Addad, Dahlgaard and Wulff-Nilsen [FOCS 2017], which uses O(n^5/3)-space and answers queries in O( n) time. We achieve this by designing an elegant and efficient point location data structure for Voronoi diagrams on planar graphs. We further show a smooth tradeoff between space and

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... -time. For any S∈ [n,n^2], we show an oracle of size S that answers queries in Õ({1,n^1.5/S}) time. This new tradeoff is currently the best (up to polylogarithmic factors) for the entire range of S and improves by polynomial factors over all the previously known tradeoffs for the range S ∈ [n,n^5/3].