Mapping Hacks

Make Route Maps Easier to Read #6

Chapter 1, Mapping Your Life

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HACK

atlas” paradigm, proceed to stuff the map full of all sorts of other details that

might be relevant when planning a route, but that only get in the way when

simply trying to follow a route. The result is worse than useless, because the

driver of an automobile is often the navigator as well, and any map that

requires more than a glance to extract crucial information can be a driving

hazard.

Making a LineDrive Map

To that end, Agrawala and Stolte set out to devise a means by which a com-

puter might automatically generate route maps in the style of hand-drawn

driving directions, for maximum readability. The result is LineDrive, a ser-

vice that they developed in conjunction with MapBlast, one of the Web’s

first consumer-oriented route-finding services. Vicinity, the company that

made MapBlast, was subsequently bought by Microsoft and turned into

MSN Maps & Directions, but the site still lives at http://www.mapblast.com/,

and it still offers the LineDrive routing service for both North America and

most of Europe.

Creating your own LineDrive driving directions map is simple. Just visit

http://www.mapblast.com/, and click “Directions” on the navigation bar.

Enter an origin and a destination in the form, and be sure to select

“LineDrive” as the map style in the radio-button group on the right. Then

click “Get Directions,” and you’re