When you get your first car, you feel an extraordinary sense of power. When you know where you're going, you feel even more omnipotent. And when you know where the nearest Burger King is, you just feel smart. New mapping software and Web services let you find your way down unfamiliar streets, or even just find the optimal route to work.

I use trip planning software a lot - sometimes just to find a friend's house (asking for directions is so passé...), but often to find a client's office. Most of the trips I plan are relatively short-range, the farthest one being about two hours long, but you can use the concept to travel cross-country as well.

When I received Streets & Trips 2000 as a Christmas gift this year, I had high expectations. I had been a frequent user of MapQuest, a Web site that does much of what S&T purported to do, but for free. Did S&T live up to it? Well, yes and no.

Streets...
The software is fairly well organized. It's dependent on the CD, but then what reference title isn't? You locate individual points, plot a route between them, and find nearby restaurants and such all from the same interface. (This is another one of those practical uses for a large monitor.)

Unlike most Web-based mapping sites, Streets & Trips is rather flexible in allowing you to search for points. You can enter portions of an address or intersection, or the name of a major business or attraction (restaurants, hotels, campsites, and everything from airports to wildlife preserves), or even latitude/longitude coordinates and it searches through the CD to give you a list of best matches.

The maps are fairly detailed. Not all of the recent construction in my area showed up, though. To its credit, I discovered parks and landmarks I never knew existed. You can have it find, say, all Chinese restaurants or all service stations within a 1.6 mile radius of a point. (The choice of predefined "places" is rather selective, though. It found the Noodle House at one of my hometown's busiest intersections but somehow overlooked the two gas stations there, both of which are closer to me than the Sunoco it finally managed to find.)

Navigating the maps is easy, though responsiveness depends largely on your CD-ROM drive's speed. You can even find the exact latitude and longitude of any point on the map (which I suppose would be useful if you were targeting a missile or something...).

and Trips...
Once you've gotten it to find two (or more) points, you can have it calculate a route between them. The options are standard fare: you can go for the fastest route (you're driving), the most scenic route (you want to stop and smell the roses), the shortest route (you're walking), or by your own set of preferences (you're picky). It plots a route for you on a map and gives you detailed directions, and, if you give it a starting or ending time, the exact time it predicts you'll be there. It also tells you how many miles are between each turn, so if you miss your exit, at least you'll know by how far.

You can even have it download construction information from the Web. Thank Microsoft I was warned that bridge work in Ohio would take place "from 07/08/3899 to 07/30/3900"...

Unfortunately, trip mapping is a rather inexact science for Streets & Trips. If you look closely at the surface-level maps, you'll find that it really doesn't have a clue which roads are decent 45 mph thoroughfares and which ones are maddeningly slow 30 mph side streets. It only takes a guess by knowing which are the "major" roads. And its definition of "major roads" are usually roads that pass through a city's downtown--which are by no means the fastest roads, by any rate. MapQuest, by contrast, doesn't make this mistake; it seems to be much more adept at picking the fastest streets.

...and Fluff
Don't worry, there's more stuff on the disc. Tourist information and photos of all the states. Web links to Microsoft's Web site. The ability to calculate your fuel consumption and tell you when to fuel up. (Again, a guess.)

Doesn't Add Up
Streets and Trips 2000 makes a great street-level mapping program. It's nice for making a map to your house so people can get to the party Friday night, or for finding restaurants near a client's office. But for getting reliable, fast directions, you're much better off with one of the free Web map sites like MapQuest.



Recommended: No