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A couple delayed their wedding when bad directions led the groom's parents astray. A pallbearer got lost on the way to his friend's funeral service. A dejected bachelor missed dinner reservations with a date when he couldn't find the restaurant.
These misguided travelers all used MapQuest, the site that provides detailed maps and driving directions for millions of locations worldwide.
Increasingly, drivers are leaving Thomas Bros. guides and AAA maps in the glove box in favor of custom directions from online map services. When they lose their way, they inevitably blame their tardiness not on human fallibility but on the mapping service: "MapQuest lied to me."
MapQuest is just one of a bevy of free map services on the Web, including Yahoo Maps, MapBlast, Lycos Maps, Maps.com, Expedia Maps and MSN MapPoint.
With more consumers gaining broadband and DSL Internet access -- and with more people traveling on the road by car instead of plane -- sites like MapQuest have seen a deluge of new users over the past year.
"It's free, online and always available," said Dave Schafer, MapQuest.com general manager. "MapQuest has become synonymous with maps."
With MapQuest, users plug in an address to pinpoint it on an online map. They can zoom in or out to see local roads or the surrounding metro area.
"That's something a paper map cannot do," Schafer said.
But despite these benefits, some users complain that "MapQuest sucks."
MapQuest doesn't always take into account highway repairs, new roads or street name changes. The service often tells drivers to turn the wrong way down a one-way road or directs them to exits and "unnamed streets" that don't exist.
Tyler Bleszinski had to veer across five lanes on San Francisco's Bay Bridge after looking for an exit that MapQuest said was on the right side, when it was actually on the left.
"The worst part about MapQuest directions is that they have a tendency to be wrong on very important details," Bleszinski said.
"I like to think of MapQuest as more of a guide to get you in the general vicinity, instead of an exact roadmap. MapQuest is good if you have common sense and instincts because it'll usually get you close, but you'll have to navigate on your own at some point."
"It seems that MapQuest never picks the shortest or fastest route, but the most convoluted one," agreed Rachel Johnston, who has gotten lost using MapQuest in three different states. "Once you are lost in your MapQuest directions and you stop to ask a local, you are always told that they would have never sent you that way."
Others are not as charitable toward the service.
"I have never once -- seriously, not ever once -- gotten the right directions from MapQuest," said Naomi Graychase. "I don't know what sense of twisted optimism makes me continue to use the fucking service -- somehow it's the only real option, you know?"
Graychase, who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, recently got lost looking for Webster Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut (about 40 miles away). MapQuest estimated the trip would take about 48 minutes. But after a half-hour drive and a series of wrong turns -- including bearing left on a one-way street going the opposite direction -- Graychase spent an additional 30 minutes trying to find the theater, which was located just five minutes from the offramp.
Still, these grievances represent only a fraction of the more than 23 million users that use MapQuest's site every day.
"The vast majority of our users are extremely satisfied with the maps and directions on our site," Schafer said. "Our number one priority is to always look for ways to increase our accuracy."
MapQuest locates addresses through a process known as geocoding, which assigns a latitude-longitude coordinate to an address so it can be displayed on a map or used in a spatial search.
There are three basic methods of calculating a geocode: address interpolation, intersection matching and ZIP codes. Address interpolation will fail in certain cases, such as when an address is ambiguous or new. If that happens, the program will attempt to assign coordinates to an address based on the ZIP code.
The system may choose one data set over another depending upon what action users take on the site -- whether they are zooming in on a neighborhood or looking at a broad view of a city and surrounding highways, for example.
Much of MapQuest's address information is derived from postal information. But the U.S. Post Office doesn't officially recognize a street until it is dedicated, so it can take up to year or longer to add a new road to the database.
MapQuest does a major data update at least once every three months, which may include thousands of street segments, Schafer said.
MapQuest encourages users to report driving direction inaccuracies and missing data, such as address errors and new roads.
In response, MapQuest's data vendors will often drive the streets to improve local coverage of the area. It's part of MapQuest's continued effort to provide clearer graphics, easier-to-read maps and simpler directions, Schafer said.
But even though people rely more and more on online maps, MapQuest directors insist that the service is not intended to supplant paper maps.
"We see paper maps and online maps as being very complementary," Schafer said.
In fact, MapQuest originally began as a cartographic service that created free road maps for gas station customers. The company currently has both print and online map divisions. Ironically, its website is one of the most printed on the Net.
Despite glitches, devotees and critics say computer-generated directions are much more convenient than pulling open a 20-fold map.
"I depend on MapQuest for nearly every place I go outside of our area, and usually it's pretty close," Bleszinski said. "That's sometimes very frustrating, but I almost always wind up at my destination and on time -- even if I nearly get killed a couple of times in the process."
