Is there a website similar to mapquest.com which provides walking directions, which can be so different from driving directions? Or is a good old fashioned street map my best bet?
As a full-time walker myself, I hope you can find that resource and let me know about it. I use Mapquest a lot, and then exploit shortcuts as I find them when going to an unfamiliar destination.
Maybe I’m missing something, but if you’re touring around in a city you’re visiting (which is why I assume you’d need walking directions), wouldn’t walking & driving directions be exactly the same?
What am I missing here?
When I visited Norfolk I had a map (from MapQuest) which showed the route from my hotel to the convention center. If I had followed that map I would have walked a lot farther. Instead I followed a more or less straight line and cut through the MacArthur Memorial and the mall. On the way back I walked a little ways out of the way and visited the church with the cannonball embedded in the wall.
That’s at least one difference between a walking map and a driving map.
While street directions for walking or driving in some places would be identical, especially over short distances, website route-finding software tends to find what the designers thinks the shortest (time-wise), easiest route for driving will be. So quite often it will push you out of your way to get to a major street or even a highway rather than go for the shorter, more complicated route.
It’d be nice to have a website, though it seems it’d mostly be useful for travellers. I have a bicycle map of the area around where I live, plus a walking/biking map of San Francisco. I wouldn’t have too great a need of maps far outside of these, though at times I’d like to have a little greater coverage for places around the Bay.
panama jack
rastahomie
you can walk the “wrong way” down a one way street.
driving you may have to go a few streets out of your way to get there.
I have a neat-o app for my Palm called Vindigo that is a local directory for Washington, DC (it’s also available for NYC and Chicago, I believe). Anyway, it lists restaurants, shops, movies and theatres, etc. And, it tell you how to get there via foot, a la walk 100 yards to 19th Street and turn left, and go up 19th street three blocks to M Street. I’m really impressed that it calculates the directions on the fly as I specify my current locale as any neighbourhood or street in the city.
I have no idea if you’re in a city that has Vindigo, or if you have a handheld PC (it’s also available for CE) but it’s a neat free app if you do. I’m sure there has to be similar technology for the walking directions on the web somewhere.
Thanks for the tip about Vindigo, Montfort. Although I don’t have a Palm (still resisting a cell phone), I checked out their website. In New York, for example, Vindigo gets info from NYToday.com, which provides three types of directions: driving, subway and walking, and walking only. (I compared, and driving vs. walking are very different sets of directions). So it IS out there (if you’re in the right places). Happy trails…
vix