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Lost - And Found
Power Trip · June 13, 2004

Getting lost isn't an option when Joe Eisenberg hits the road. A field engineer in Lincoln, Neb., he relies on accurate directions to find his service calls. A typical workday may involve multiples stops, a task too complex for the average Web-based mapping service to efficiently plot.

"I have to plan my order of service calls so that I spend the least amount of time backtracking, and hopefully end up closer to home at the end of the day," he says.

Travelers have turned to the Web for turn-by-turn directions almost since there's been a Web to turn to. No one knows the exact size of the mapping market — online or offline — but it's a safe bet that frequent travelers refer to them on a regular basis for help. The Web site Mapquest.com as well as MSN's Maps & Directions deliver millions of directions each day.

For a vast majority of the road trips, online directions do the trick. But Eisenberg says he consults MapPoint, a program that allows you to work with geographic data in ways you can't on the Web. For example, the latest version of MapPoint lets him use "pushpins" to mark his customer sites, import demographic data, chart his preferred route and then to export it to a handheld device if necessary. MapPoint's maps also easily integrate into Microsoft Office documents. Since Eisenberg likes to carefully choreograph his service calls, he says the program works better than a Web site.

Getting more than directions

Call me a skeptic, but I couldn't think of any reason to invest $299 in information that I could basically get for free online — until I ran into a business problem that only an application like MapPoint could solve. I had sold my home, from which I run my business, and needed to find a new neighborhood to relocate to. Not just any neighborhood, though. I had a long list of criteria, including specific demographic characteristics.

Online mapping services could show me how to reach a neighborhood. They might even tell me what the demographics of a given neighborhood are by ZIP code. But I needed to see everything on one page: average home values, the age of homes, education levels, and even how many kids lived in the area (there's nothing like trying to concentrate on work with a hundred screaming children splashing in the pool next door).

You might face face challenges like this every day. Where do you focus your marketing efforts? In which regions is your company underperforming? Where should you open a new store?

A mapping application allowed me to pull all the relevant data — I even managed to overlay the airport flight path to ensure our new home wouldn't have a problem with aircraft noise. The only thing worse than shrieking kids, you will agree, is the roar of a 747 on final approach. Just try conducting a phone interview with that kind of racket going on outside.

What would have taken hours, even days to research could be pulled together in minutes. I found the right neighborhood, the right street, even the right house, thanks to the features in MapPoint. What's more, the program was about as easy to use as a word processor. Grasping the essentials took almost no time. There are other PC-based applications for mapping software, such as ArcGIS from ESRI and Intergraph's MGE, and they're also worth a look if your business gets serious about its mapping applications.

Go online or off?

If you travel a lot on business, or you simply use maps a great deal for locating cities and specific addresses, a key question is whether you should continue to rely on Web-based directions or switch to a PC-based application such as MapPoint or Rand McNally's Road Atlas Road Travel Software. Interestingly, after having spoken with numerous frequent travelers, the answer is: It really depends. Here are a few tips.

If Internet connections are iffy, go offline. You can't always depend on an Internet hookup — and if you find it, you might get stuck with a sluggish dial-up connection. So pack your laptop PC and CD-ROMs, at the very least as a backup. Joselito Tomas, who spends a lot of time crisscrossing Los Angeles County visiting construction sites, likes the flexibility of offline programs. But he acknowledges their limitations, too. "They give you the mileage, but you have to take the time required to get there with a huge grain of salt, since it estimates an average driving speed at 60 mph," he says. Obviously, that's not the case in a place like Los Angeles.

If you need the most up-to-date road conditions, try to keep your connection. CD-ROM based applications need to be updated frequently, as Brian Todd, a lobbyist in Bakersfield, Calif., has discovered. "For me, the [PC-based] mapping programs don't work because I have to update them constantly and it's too much to lug a laptop around," he says. He prefers a Web-based program because it includes new and changed streets, bridges and buildings. "I'd rather let someone else do the updating for me," he says. Plus, for many of us there's no substitute for holding a paper map that we can refer to in a car without having to power up a PC. Incidentally, a paper atlas works pretty well in a situation like this, too.

If you're exporting data to a PDA, use both. Adam Dicker, a physician at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, downloads map information from Microsoft Streets & Trips to his iPAQ 2200 when he travels. "I have software that can link my appointments with files, like image files, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets," he says. What if he doesn't have the time? His PDA also lets him use a GPS map while he's out of the office, and although it's not as detailed as the information he downloads from Streets & Trips, it does get him from point A to point B.

Bottom line: You can get directions from any place. But if your needs are more specialized — say you're working with a PDA or need to see other kinds of information on a map — then you should carefully consider the source. Online, turn-by-turn directions are fine for simple trips, but as a traveler, you might want to invest in an offline application that delivers more information.

If you don't, you can try the next best thing. Pull over and ask for directions.

Christopher Elliott is a travel journalist and commentator. All e-mailed responses may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.

Get a look behind the scenes at Power Trip. Check out Elliott's Travel Notes blog.