Weblog

Thursday March 09, 2006

Directions for driving

In Australia, if you've got a car then unless you're a tourist, you'll have a street directory (or road atlas) in your car. Depending on what city you're in and what your personal preference is, it'll either be a Melways or UBD. In Melbourne, everyone uses Melways and their layout was (in the past) so superior to UBD that UBD changed theirs during the 1990s from the tourist-style "hollow" roads to map-style solid lines to mimic Melways. If you were going someplace, you'd either be given a Melways reference to start with (not uncommon on party, wedding, etc invitations) or lookup the street in the index and find a path through the maps. This can be quite a chore, depending on where you're going to/from but it is part of your training to be a driver.

If you ask someone in the USA if they've got a street directory, you'll most likely get a blank look. If you mention road atlas, you might get a nod of understanding but still a questioning look. How do Americans ever get where they're going, you might wonder? At least two that I'm familiar with.

1. Visit AAA and acquire a collection of maps;

2. Use a website to get directions from "here" to "there".

Increasingly more people use (2) and indeed, at first bite it seems quite useful, that is so long as everything is perfect. When aren't things perfect? When, for example, someone decides to dig up the road and you're forced to take a detour. Another example is the directions say "turn left", but the intersection you're turning at is not a "simple intersection" and the map that you printed out doesn't have enough detailed information to tell you which one is right. You're also not well equipped to discover alternative routes if you get stuck in heavy traffic, etc. Having a road atlas when travelling on highways has given me the power to turn off, rather than crawl along, and take much less crowded roads for a much nicer driving experience.

Just to round this out, my experience with using (1) is that the maps are often not as accurate as I'm used to with Melways when it comes to both presence of roads and their condition - paved vs graded (for example.)

Road signs and odometers

In more advanced parts of the world, distances between places are measured in meters and kilometers, using a nice rounded metric system. Fractions thereof are simply - 1/10th of a kilometer is 100m, etc. In cars, the needle that indicates speed moves just like it would for miles but there's something else that is part of that display that's a little different - the odometer. Everything fits together quite nicely.

In older American cars, the odometer was mechanical, with some having markings of 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, to indicate fractions of a mile. In more modern cars bought and driven in the USA, you can sometimes find a digital display that will show you 0-9, or 10ths of a mile. Some now don't show it at all.

Enter American road signs. There seems to be no standard about what goes on a road sign, whether it be 1/4 mile or 1000feet - I've seen both, although the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 of mile are the most appropriate. In most cases, you don't need to measure the distance because it is generally quite obvious and the sign is just an indication of whatever is there - but not always.

The last piece to add to this mix is getting driving directions from the Internet. Most of these directions will use decimal fractions (3.2, 0.5, etc) to show distances.

I don't know what the solution to the madness here in the USA is and quite possibly, if you're American you don't even notice it and hence I'm not sure if anything can be done about it except to have a rant :)