I love maps. I’ve been collecting them for years, principally the state road maps that the major gasoline companies used to give out free. Nowadays, I buy them in bookstores to keep abreast of the speediest interstates and the most-scenic back roads.
The computer has added a valuable new technological dimension to it all.
CD-ROMs and the Internet offer a host of tools to pinpoint locations and provide detailed directions from Point A to Point B, with or without stops on the way to dine, sightsee or spend the night. It also offers supposedly up-to-the-minute information on road construction, speed traps and other hazards. Via satellite, it helps disoriented travelers determine where they are.
There are several major players in the field. One is the Vicinity Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif., a leader in electronic map services.
Another is Etak Inc., of Menlo Park, Calif., a subsidiary of the Sony Corp. and a major mapmaker and developer of satellite locater software.
A third is the GeoSystems Global Corp. of Lancaster, Pa., a developer of cartographic software products. Their names may be unfamiliar, but most Internet map programs depend on one or more of them.
Another major player is Rand McNally New Media of Skokie, but it offers very little on line besides pitches to buy such products as its CD-ROMs: TripMaker ($39.95) and StreetFinder ($49.95). DeLorme Publishing of Freeport, Maine, uses its Web site to push CD-ROMs (Street Atlas, $45, and AAA Map’n’Go, $39), but it also lets anyone test them on line, without charge.
My favorite of all the programs I tested was Maps on Us (www.mapsonus.com), developed by Lucent Technologies (the old Bell Laboratories of AT&T) with map data from Etak Inc. It quickly produced a map of my neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia. I could easily zoom in or out, either a little at a time or in giant steps. I could pan in eight directions, either by half screen or full screen. I could tailor-make a map according to scale (2 to 400 miles per inch) or degree of detail. Once I had typed in my preferences, Maps on Us took 50 seconds to produce a driving map from my neighborhood to a Westchester County suburb of New York.
There was a problem, however. The map and driving directions instructed me to turn onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Pennsylvania Highway 263. It can’t be done; believe me, I’ve frequented that neighborhood for 30 years. Highway 263 passes beneath the turnpike; the nearest interchange is a half-mile westward.
(The same error occurred in routings produced by the Etak-based programs of Lycos, Yahoo and Vicinity’s MapBlaster.)
To my surprise, however, Maps on Us readily acknowledged its imperfections. A message on its Web site stated: “Although much of our road information is extremely accurate, some is not. . . . Sometimes our routes can be, well, creative. . . . We ask that you be patient with any errors you may find. Our routing will continuously improve as the quality of our data improves and as we invent better routing algorithms (a set of instructions for solving problems).”
Maps on Us gave me a choice of routes: fastest, shortest, favor major highways or avoid them. The fastest route to the New York suburb was calculated as 105.1 miles, taking 2 hours and 9 minutes, which seemed reasonable, assuming typical traffic. (Other map programs assumed, however, that I would drive at the speed limit, an unreasonable assumption given the frequent traffic jams near New York City.)
The directions weren’t door to door, as they would have been in a good CD-ROM map program. Rather, they were from the major highway nearest to my home to the one nearest to my destination. So for serious mapmaking, such as to plot a multistop business trip or to tell faraway friends how to reach my home or church for a wedding, I’d prefer a CD-ROM.
Other map programs on line include:
– DeLorme’s CyberMaps (http://www.delorme.com)–Within this program, the CyberAtlas will map the neighborhood around any postal ZIP code, but not a specific street address. DeLorme’s maps can provide a lot more detail than Etak’s, but lack room to label the detail legibly. All the on-line maps are of mag 12 or 13 (covering about one mile per inch, but too capsuled to identify the streets), while in the Street Atlas CD-ROM they can be zoomed in or out to 13 different levels, providing abundant street detail if desired.
DeLorme’s CyberRouter, drawn from AAA Map’n’Go 2.0 CD-ROM, plotted a 14-step drive from my Pennsylvania home to downtown Manhattan. The quickest route was 97 miles, CyberRouter said, and took only 1 hour 47 minutes–hard for me to believe.
– MapQuest (http://www.mapquest.com)–This program of GeoSystems Global Corp. of Lancaster, Pa., was launched early last year and recently reported up to 2 million hits, or site visits, a day. Its TripQuest section took only 29 seconds to plot me from suburban Philadelphia to Mt. Vernon, N.Y., but it took me to the wrong Mt. Vernon–to a small suburb of Buffalo (406.2 miles) rather than a major city just north of the Bronx (103.1 miles). It never asked for ZIP codes.
TripQuest offers a choice of city to city or door to door for many routings, but it can’t always do door to door. You can adorn the map with information from a vast database on lodging, dining, shopping, medical facilities, recreation, etc., and print it all out for yourself and friends.
– AutoPilot Highway Trip Planning System (http://www.freetrip.com)–This site was developed by a Marlton, N.J., company with the intriguing name of Red Sector A Inc., with maps by Mapsys Inc., of Alexandria, Va. Not only did AutoPilot quickly route me from suburban Philadelphia to suburban New York, but at my request it also provided details on all the Hampton Inns and Embassy Suites (participants in the Web site) en route.
– United States Gazetteer (http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer)–This governmental site locates any place in the country and allows you to add detail, zoom and pan.
– Street Maps of the Real World (http://www.lycos.com/roadmap.html)–This program was developed by Lycos Inc., Pittsburgh, affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. Its maps are powered by the Vicinity Corp. with data from Etak. Although I could zoom, it was cumbersome to create a map with driving directions from far away because the larger the area, the less the detail shown.
– MapBlast (http://www.mapblast.com)–This Vicinity program (“Blast me a map!” its home page shouts) is similar to Lycos’. Its distinctive features: Maps can be transmitted by e-mail, printed out or added to a personal home page. There is a choice of color for type and background: “sunrise,” “midday,” “sunset” or “late night.”
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Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com)
