A while ago I tried MapQuest to find the quickest way from Jersey City, NJ, to Nyack, NY, and they suggested crossing the Hudson via the Holland Tunnel, driving up the West Side of Manhattan, and then crossing back on the Tappan Zee Bridge, which may very well be the quickest way at 4 AM but probably not. If you tried that at 5 PM it would triple the drive time, probably.
My main beef with Mapquest is that they don’t label roads the way they are labelled on the streets: a freeway exit and quick right onto Main Street may be divided into three or four spurious “roads” that all look like SR 62/CO 767/INVISIBLE RD/MAIN ST and last for a tenth of a mile. It doesn’t make it impossible but it’s extranenous noise.
I like GoogleMaps because of the cool-ass way the maps move on screen, but I haven’t tested their directions much, I just print the map and figure it out for myself.
I have pretty good luck with it. Once or twice it’s been wrong, but I’ve been able to quickly correct.
I have a friend who works for Navtech, who provides information to MapQuest. His job is to drive around all day and plot out all the streets. Can’t turn left? Mark that down. Right turn only lane? Mark that down.
I joke that I blame him for whatever problems I have with the directions.
I have MapQuest work well for me about half the time. A few weeks ago I asked for directions to somewhere I’d been before, but wanted to see if there was a better way to drive. I got a totally different route from what I’d driven in the past. It took twice as long, but the leaves were changing and the scenery was exquisite. It’s all about attitude.
I used MapQuest for househunting last year - at least 10 open houses every Sunday for three months. I would collect the addresses on Saturday from various sources, mark them out on a city map, plot the best order to see them in, and then use MapQuest for directions from place 1 to place 2 and so on. It worked fine, although once in a while I had to ignore certain bits that I knew were wrong.
(Although I had lived in the city for 24 years there were lots of areas and streets I wasn’t familiar with).
Now that we have moved to our new house, I always have to ignore the part of any directions going from my house north on the freeway, as it requires 2 illegal left turns. I do wish they could get that fixed one day.
When I worked in Columbia, MD (just outside of Baltimore), I belonged to the columbia freecycle and was using it almost every week to find someone’s house. Mapquest always gave me accurate directions in and around columbia. It even picked “good” routes (i.e. it found the nice short cut through the neighborhood instead of routing me back to rt 29). No complaints at all.
I live in Hanover PA though, and mapquest doesn’t seem to know diddley about rural PA. It puts my house about half a mile down the road from where I live, and more often than not, if I type in a destination somewhere around Hanover, it cant’ find it. Mapquest also has no freakin clue about what are good roads and bad roads to take out of Hanover. It will happily route me along the worst 2 lane bumpy country road in the state. I pretty much ignore anything it has to say until it gets me to an interstate.
