by Susan Ives, Alamo PC

If you’re driving to a local business the best place to start is the Express-News SA Yellow Pages. Type in the name of a business like Taco Cabana, St. Mary’s University or Crossroads Mall and you get the address, or a list of addresses if it’s a chain such as Taco Cabana. Click on an address and you get a map. Ask for driving directions and you can enter your starting point and get both a map and written directions from here to there. 

For house-to-house directions I usually rely on Yahoo. For this you’ll need a street address. Type in it. Click go. Get a map. Ask for driving directions if you need them. The system isn’t perfect. When I asked for directions to PC Alamode editor Clarke Bird’s house, Yahoo had me turning left off of Wurzbach onto Lockhill- Selma. Can’t do it: the road’s been blocked for more than a year. 

The City of San Antonio has a road closure list on its Web site but the last time I checked it told me that there were no closed roads in the entire city. Perhaps this is why the Lockhill-Selma and West Avenue constructions are taking so long and why S. St. Mary’s is still blocked off northbound through Baja King William. They forgot about them. If it gets going again, find a link to the list at <http://www.ci.sat.tx.us/escs/>.

You can get highway lane closures from TransGuide. Click on an area of the map for current road conditions or click on an X to see highway and exit closures. There is also a dynamic route builder that will estimate travel times along a route (tricky to use, but fun) and aerial photos of the proposed 410/IH10 spaghetti junction. Now that Alamo PC is in Crossroads Mall this is important to all of us. The equipment link won’t take you to tractors and cranes but rather to video cameras and road signs. The data is refreshed every few minutes. You’ll need to have Java enabled on your browser to use this site.

If highway data grinds your gearbox, make sure you check out The Texas Highwayman’s Guide to the San Antonio Freeways Did you know that Bexar County has the second largest system of state highways in the nation? Or that a recent study ranked these highways as the best maintained among the largest US urban areas? The Texas Highwayman, a.k.a. Brian K. Purcell, knows every inch of our roadways. You can get the history, lane maps of every square inch of highway, and even a guided tour of all the kinds of traffic signals in San Antonio. He is a man obsessed.

For long distance driving directions I use MapQuest, MapBlast or Expedia. Their features vary slightly, but all will give you turn-by-turn driving directions cross-country, doorstep-to-doorstep. MapBlast has a huge list of countries so if you need directions in Finland or Papua New Guinea you can, in theory, get them. However, when I tried to map a route from our house to Monterrey, Mexico the program burped and told me it couldn’t calculate the directions. These sites will let you plan specific routes: for example, I could stipulate that on my way to visit my brother in Warrington, PA I want to stop over in Louisville to visit my friend Claudia. The maps can be downloaded into a handheld personal digital assistant. If you have a PDA or Web-enabled phone you can probably get the map data in real time wherever you are. 

If you’re flying, driving or hiking you might need a different type of map. Get topo, aero and nautical maps from the Maptech Map Server These maps are interactive and very cool.

VISA has an ATM finder that will locate cash machines all over the world. If you ever find yourself in Zimbabwe, the only ATM that will accept your VISA card is at 348 Justine Street in Beit Bridge. Remember that. Mastercard has a similar service. I love it when a map gives me access to money.

APB, the first Internet news network devoted exclusively to crime, justice and safety, runs another specialty map site. Two of the map-based utilities caught my eye. In one, you can type in your zip code and get a map and a crime index rating. My zip, 78230, rated a 5, smack dab in the middle. They are working on improving the interface to provide data down to the census tract level. 

The other interesting — and controversial — feature is the college community crime map, covering 1,497 colleges in the United States. APB tracks crime in a 1-2 mile radius around the college campus. Colleges are given a rating based on the surrounding community’s crime rate. In San Antonio, UTSA is in the safest neighborhood — rated a 5, just like my neighborhood. All of the other four-year colleges here are 8s, in areas of moderate to high crime. In contrast, my alma mater got a safe 3 rating, and it’s less than 40 minutes from Manhattan. 

Susan Ives is a former president of Alamo PC.