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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
What you'll find with MS Streets & Trips 2004

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Friday, August 22, 2003
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Microsoft Streets & Trips 2004 is the latest update to what's become my favorite consumer mapping program. It's just started showing up in stores--I bought a copy at my favorite superstore for $14.99 after a $20 mail-in rebate--and I had a chance to use it on my trip to Yosemite last week as well as in designing the route for the bike club I'm helping to start.

The mapping landscape
There are lots of mapping products out there, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Here's what our reviewers thought of the two major packages.
The two projects showed up both the strengths and weaknesses of the program, which I'll enumerate in a moment. I'm also in the process of checking out some competing products--I just received an e-mail about the 2004 versions of DeLorme's mapping apps and will report back on them as well.

IN ONE RESPECT, DeLorme clearly has the upper hand over Microsoft: Its Topo USA is the only product I know of that combines both street maps and topographical information. This can be very helpful at times. The point is that, while I vastly prefer Microsoft Streets & Trips for most applications, I don't think it's perfect.

For example, the program has had me leaving freeways via exits that don't exist. Its routing has occasionally turned a left-hand turn into a righty and vice versa. This was almost a problem with my bike ride map, but human editing (and looking at the map) caught the discrepancy.

If you use any digital map products, either software or online, you've run into these same problems. Microsoft isn't immune to them, but it's no worse than the rest of the pack, either, as best I can tell.

The 2004 version does, however, fix some standing problems: One-way streets are now shown. The program also now updates itself from a connected GPS receiver in something like real time; previous versions took 15 to 20 seconds to update. When driving at 60mph, such lags could result in the program's display being a quarter mile or more behind your actual location.

ONE THING that hasn't changed is the map displays, which are gorgeous and print beautifully. Streets & Trips has also inherited some features from its big brother, Microsoft MapPoint. One of these is "drive time zones," which purports to map the area that can be reached within a given period of time from a particular location.

A typical use for this is to answer a question like, "How far from my house can I drive in an hour?" or "How far can someone be from my office and still get there in 30 minutes or less?"

I say "purports" to answer this question not because it's faking but because it can't possibly know all the ins-and-outs of local street geography. It doesn't, for example, know about hills and valleys, both of which can dramatically increase travel times or make other routes preferable to the ones the program looks at.

Still, the drive time zones, if taken with a grain of salt, do provide useful information that can be adjusted to local conditions. It's also a real eye-opener to see the zigzags created by freeway and highway access versus areas served only by slower surface streets.

Another feature borrowed from MapPoint: the ability to create a route and have the program optimize stops to get your errands done in the most efficient manner. Sometimes this will have to be changed to match time requirements--something has to be done at a specific place at a specific time--but the information is useful nonetheless.

The program includes some 1.3 million points of interest, including 492,000 restaurants, 197,000 service stations, and so on down to 2,000 theaters. Nevertheless, it failed to include among the 58,000 motels most of those in Lee Vining, Calif., where I spent last Thursday night.

I RARELY leave home--certainly never for a trip over 100 miles or where I am not familiar with the roads or destination--without consulting Streets & Trips. With the improvements in the 2004 version, I've also started using Microsoft Pocket Streets (free with the desktop software) with my Pocket PC and a Navman GPS sleeve.

To be honest, as a map junkie, I've never found a piece of mapping software I didn't like something about. But Microsoft Streets & Trips 2004 is the one I most often recommend to friends.

(Note: Just to be complete, let me say that the professional topographical software I recommend is from Maptech, with DeLorme and National Geographic's TOPO! software being my consumer recommendations. If you're interested in topo maps, I advise you to check out all three companies before buying).

What do you think? Do you use mapping software? Which one is your favorite? TalkBack to me! 

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