Microsoft Streets & Trips 2003

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Microsoft Streets & Trips 2003 is absolutely essential to anyone who travels. For instance, you can enter 10 destinations. Then the program will tell you the optimal way of going from place to place. Much better than Mapquest.com

Rating:
Summary: Everything you wish MapQuest was
Review: My experience is with MS Streets&Trips 00, 01, and 02; I'm sure that '03 will be even better. As a consultant, I do a lot of traveling, all over the United States. I needed something that worked like MapQuest and resided on my laptop, so that I didn't have to carry an atlas with me, and I could use it without a network or dial-up connection.

Microsoft Streets and Trips hit the nail on the head. It does everything that you wish MapQuest could do, and more. You can install it so that it uses the CD, or simply install the whole thing on your hard drive. Since this is a really great program for a laptop, you might want to stick with simply using the CD - the "full install" is over 1GB.

The route mapping function is quick and intuitive - you can tell it what time you want to start and stop driving each day, and it will tell you where to spend the night. You can tell it to avoid certain areas. You can have it calculate the absolute shortest route, or the quickest route, based on your driving speeds. Unlike MapQuest, Streets and Trips is usually accurate to within 10 minutes on the hour. A great feature is "Avoid Area" - say you're on a trip, and there's a ten-mile traffic jam from construction. You snap open the laptop, tell it to avoid the problem area, and it will reroute you around it.

Included on the CD is information about travel-related businesses - restaurants, hotels, points of interest, movie theatres. You can find places near a route you're planning, or, if you find yourself in, say, Toledo, you can find where a good selection of restaurants is. They DON'T provide reviews, so you'll have to use your travel-savvy to figure out which ones are the good ones.

I've had a few problems with the directions I've received on Streets and Trips, but usually those problems are either operator error, or very recent construction.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Functionality, More Accurate Data Than S&T 2002
Review: Streets and Trips 2003

Streets and Trips 2003 is a great product that offers more functionality and better performance than web-based map offerings or competitive products. While the product functionality is basically the same as S&T 2002, the data is vastly better. Interestingly, when I inquired about the horribly inaccurate data in Streets and Trips 2002 Microsoft agreed that it was poor! Microsoft indicated that it would be using an entirely new dataset for 2003. This is appears to be true. Clearly, there is a quantum leap forward in accuracy. The hotel data is of particular interest and it appears to very accurate, unlike that of its predecessor.

Since other sources will discuss general program attributes, let this review serve as a reference for savvy users. As an owner of other map programs and a former user of Mapquest, I have a great deal of experience with competitive products. At the same time, I have traveled 100% for my career and have used a GPS receiver with multiple map software products.

For those wondering why to purchase this program if there is free map web sites such as Mapquest, there are several reasons:

1)Speed
a. There is no need for connectivity, which can be a problem even for broadband users
b. Panning and zooming is virtually instantaneous
2)Map quality is far superior than those on web sites
3)My favorite: More powerful tweaking-You can set driving speeds of different types of roads, which is a extremely valuable in urban areas. For example, if you have a rush hour suburban Chicago to Chicago commute, the highways are not going to offer driving speeds of 65 mph. Hence, you modify interstate highways driving speeds to 30 (from 65) and local roads to 20 (from 35 and 31), which can then generate directions vastly different from the normal settings.
4)There are no advertisements on your screen or your print-outs
5)All around flexibility (save maps, plan trips, better analytics)
6)Multiple point-of-interest categories
7)You can save maps with user-defined points-of-interest and reload the maps
8) Integration with GPS receivers, which is helpful for road warriors with laptops

What is lacking (wishful thinking):
1)Integrated, real-time congestion data
2)Map data and point-of-interest updates via the Internet
3)Fast GPS data (the current version has a slow refresh rate)

Streets and Trips 2003 is an all around great product from both a usability and functionality standpoint. I would highly recommend it to both the casual tourist and the traveling professional.

Rating:
Summary: Still the Best
Review: Streets and Trips is still the best. I have chosen it over the others, for 6 years running. Upgrading from 2002 to 2003 provided only minor improvements, for me, but since the trip routing for long trips more than makes up for its expense (cheaper and better than AAA), it was a definite upgrade. The calculations are fast and accurate. Just an all-around good deal.

Rating:
Summary: For Canada go to the AAA
Review: The Amazon.COM review says:
"Around town or across the country, hit the road with Microsoft Streets & Trips 2003. Accurate and easy, the 2003 release has everything you need to navigate, travel, and explore the U.S. and Canada."

In actuality Streets & Trips offers virtually NOTHING you need to travel or explore in Canada. Other than for a few of the bigger cities, you will not find a motel, hotel, restaurant, gas station or other type of service in the nation. Most of the various towns and cities even have the names of their streets either missing or incomplete. Border crossings have customs stations, and none are shown. Landmarks seem to be missing and instead, if one looks at landmarks, one finds indoor pools, outdoor rinks, and community centers with the occasional supermarket.

I grant you that there is much better information for Toronto and Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver, but in general there is NO information. The train track used by Amtrak and VIA Rail between Toronto and Chicago disappears in the Halton Hills west of Toronto and suddenly reappears in the middle of the Saint Claire River by Sarnia, Ontario/Port Huron, Michigan. The Red River of the North reaches the border of Manitoba and suddenly ends right there, even though in real life it continues north into Lake Winnipeg. The Trent-Severn Waterway, on a par with the Erie Canal as far as Canada is concerned, disappears as one zooms in for more detail, and if one looks at Campbellford, ON and finds the bridge over the Trent River, one is looking at a road that seems to be on land all the way. Resorts on a lake such as East Lake, which is south and west of Picton, Ontario, are on dry land as this 7 kilometer long lake is simply not there. Streams and rivers and ponds and lakes simpy disappear at the border or show on the US side of the border and end AT the border when in reality they are on the northern side of the border too. Follow the border south and east from the Lake of the Woods to Lake Superior and you will see that happen again and again. Airports? Forget it... In many cases they too are missing on the Canadian side but show up on the US side. Sault Ste Marie Michigan and Ontario are a good example. The Canadian side airport simply is not there.

Then there are the errors in the roads and ferries and other travel details. Exits on limited access highways are hit and miss. Roads cross water where a ferry does so in real life. Roads seem to intersect when there really is an overpass, and routes are drawn when it is impossible to actually travel that way because of fences or other barriers that prevent the route changes. I could go on for hours. Casino Rama is not in, Rama, Ontario is not in, almost every bar, nightclub, cinema, pub or bus stop in Toronto is not in, and the Subway is shown using the train station symbol instead of the Subway symbol.

The counts given in the advertising are also wrong, by the way, since, just as one example, banks in Canada are all in TWICE! They show up once without the telephone number and once with the telephone number. While I do not know how many instances of 'bank' were counted, it must be over 1000 and therefore for that alone the count is at least 500 too high. There are many other instances where a place is in more than once, under two categories, yet is only one place. To me that also equals an overcount.

In simple terms, Streets & Trips 2003 is an INSULT to Canada and to Canadians. It does an actual DISSERVICE to Canada, since it HAS to discourage anyone planning a vacation or trip in Canada outside the major cities. It is very hard to plan a trip when there is NO place to sleep the night, no place to eat a meal, and no place to gas or service the car, yet that is the case in most of Canada.

To be fair, that seems to be the case in Mexico as well, but I do not live in Mexico, and therefore will leave rating Streets & Trips from the Mexican view to a Mexican. From my view don't bother using it for planning a trip in Canada... Go to the AAA instead!

Rating:
Summary: Where it really counts--ACCURACY--this program fails.
Review: Whatever else this program gets right (and I'm not sure how much it does), Streets & Trips 2003 contains unacceptably outdated map data. For example, entire freeways in Las Vegas are missing, even though these freeways have existed for several years.

S&T 2003 works well for cities like San Francisco and New York, but if you want to map a location that has changed within the last five years or so, the program is worthless.