Route 66 finds both the fastest and the shortest driving route between two cities. That’s no big deal if the cities are San Francisco and New York (quick tip: don’t drive, take a plane). But when you need to find your way from Phoenix to a town you’ve never visited, such as Bisbee, Arizona, Route 66 can tell you which way to go and how long it will take to get there.
Using the program is easy. You tell Route 66 where your trip begins and ends by entering place names in a dialog box. After asking for either the quickest or the shortest route, you click on Find.
Route 66 searches its database of roads, trying to determine the best route for your journey. It draws a map, highlighting its recommended route, and creates written driving directions with estimated travel times and distances.
Route 66 includes an option to calculate bike routes. Unfortunately, the program couldn’t find routes between cities I’ve ridden between, and many of the routes it did recommend were longer than necessary or traveled down roads I don’t consider safe for hikes. For example, the program recommends a 222-mile route between Santa Cruz and Salinas, California — towns only 40 miles apart.
Route 66 couldn’t find better bike routes because it and similar programs list only county roads, highways, and freeways, not every street in the country. For traveling by car. Route 66 w'ill get you to a town’s limits but won’t get you to a specific street address. You don’t use programs like this to find your way from an airport to a nearby hotel, but to calculate routes between cities.
When I travel by car, I sometimes need to visit several cities during the same trip. Route 66 can only calculate trips including three cities. The similar Automap Road Atlas... can handle six. Worse, Route 66’s U.S. map didn’t list all the towns I looked for (for example, Austin, Nevada; Cornucopia, Wisconsin; and the entire state of Alaska were missing). The company says its current U.S. database includes 13,000 towns and cities. In contrast. Automap claims its database includes 120,000 locations. Route 66’s database doesn’t include national parks or other recreational destinations. And while you can buy maps for much of Europe, you can’t buy maps of Canada or Mexico.
The program runs native on Power Macs and is fast on a 25MHz 040 Quadra 700. Route 66 doesn’t suffer from the slow screen redraw' of Automap Road Atlas. But like Automap, Route 66 displays only one route at a time. You can’t simultaneously view different routes on your screen.
The program’s extensive, well-documented support for AppleScript means that you could build scripts to access Route 66’s features through other programs such as Excel or FileMaker. But I’m not sure Route 66’s database is up to the task.
The company plans to offer registered owners a free upgraded database during the first half of 1995. Future plans beyond that include optional detailed maps for specific cities and metro areas. These improvements will he welcomed.
The Last Word
Route 66 is fast. But since I spend more time reading maps than creating them, I need more than speed. I need flexibility and detail, and Route 66 doesn’t provide them. The program can guide me between big towns like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But it can’t show me how to drive to some smaller towns like Trexlertown, Pennsylvania.
There’s a lot to like about Route 66. But until its database is more complete, Automap Road Atlas, though slower, is a better buy.
Feeley, Jim. (May 1995). Route 66 1.5. Macworld. (pg. 65).
ROUTE 66 Geographic Information Systems B.V.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
5 / 
2021-12-03 / 
4d44a7b27a6afe990c67198b98981071ffbed675 / 
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Route_66_1.5_USA.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
