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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.)