The Dangers of MapQuest

MapQuest can be a handy way to figure distances when beginning to plot the course of a trip. MapQuest gives a quick summary of the total distance and the estimated time. This basic information is useful, if only as a rough idea of how long a trip might take.

MapQuest supplies directions that are the most direct and utilize four lane roads where available. MapQuest defaults to the interstates. The only way around this is to plot several sub-courses from small town to small town. The danger in this approach is that you end up with multiple pages of directions that very quickly are out of proper order since they have been shoved inside the atlas. But I must confess to being more ready and able to handle the organization of several sets of MapQuest directions than the problems that the generic MapQuest directions present.

The problems with MapQuest are detail and perspective/magnification. MapQuest provides detail to an excrutiating degree, beginning with how to leave my house. What is most disconcerting about MaqQuest directions is that each instruction and distance is on par with every other. If I am turning right from my childhood home on Mt. Elam Road and traveling for 1/16th of a mile, that appears as one line of instruction. If I am merging onto Route 90 at a place where it is also several other routes, MapQuest can make it seem that I must first travel on these others before I officially merge onto Route 90 so that I maight continue on it for 197 miles. Four lines of directions in order to merge, or so it seems to me.

In all the detail provided by MapQuest, I never know where I am. I have great difficulty in making the adjustment from MapQuest to my road atlas. I say to Lisa, “We’ll be on this interstate for 456 miles, but will we be in Ohio by then?” Of course I can get out a scrap of paper and mark it off, but that is difficult because you must remember exactly where you got on the highway however many states back.

I also find myself unable to locate where I am supposed to be on the supplied directions. I may be three-quarters down the page of instruction, but still be in my hometown if what I will be then taking is an interstate for the next 460 miles. As a result, I always have a false sense of how much more I need to do before I arrive. If the instructions that take me from the outskirts of the town of my final destination to the exact street address take up as much space as all the directions up until that point, I feel as if I will never be there. It is the MapQuest Paradox.