`Smart' car needed _ now (AND NOW WE HAVE WAZE!!)

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Rosemary calls for directions Sunday afternoon as I'm sitting at the kitchen table clipping a story about "smart cars."

Smart cars - as opposed to dumb cars - are automobiles which have built-in computerized road maps on their dashboards. Little sensors in the car's wheels actually measure distance traveled and a built-in magnetic compass instructs the driver of a car, in an R2D2 voice, how to get from point A to point B.

If there's heavy traffic on the road, the voice maps out an alternate route. One hundred of these smart cars are being test marketed in Orlando, Fla., right now, and I want one.

"Is there a Bradlees in Dedham?" Rosemary asks. No, not in Dedham, I tell her, in Walpole.

"How do I get to Walpole?" she wants to know.

"From Newton, it's easy. Just take Route 128 to 95 and get off at. . ." Here I pause. I don't know the name of the exit, though I have taken it a million times. "It's the first one after you get on. It's the exit that says something street."

Rose accepts this, even understands it. We have been friends for that many years. Then she pops another question.

"Do I get on 95 going toward Boston or Providence?"

This is a tough one. I don't have a clue. I hand the phone to my husband who gives Rose directions.

Last weekend I was in Virginia. I rented a car and drove over hill, over dale, even over a mountain or two and never got lost. It was something of a miracle.

"You're not going yourself?" my mother-in-law gasped when I told her of my plans. "You're driving how many miles from the airport? Ohmygod, you'll never do it."

She remembers the small error I made a few years ago in London when I read a map upside down. Our destination was Scotland and I had us heading south, because I thought that since cars drove on the left, that left was right, which meant that up was down, which meant that of, course, you read a map upside down.

It was a logical mistake. I still can't figure out why I was wrong, which makes my mother-in-law and the rest of my family shudder.

Last weekend there was none of this geographic disorientation.

"Take a right on Highway 29 south, follow 6 miles. Take Route 250 west and proceed 4 1/2 miles." These are the directions the girl from Avis wrote out for me. These are the kind of specific directions everyone I met gave.

But things aren't like this around here. People don't speak in route numbers. They talk about the Expressway, the Mass. Pike, the Central Artery, the Mid-Cape highway. They say things like, "Take a left at the first street past the cemetery," or "Go past Dunkin Donuts then take a right." And what happens is you miss Dunkin Donuts, because you're looking at Taco Bell, and then you're lost.

I got lost again Friday night. I was in Fitchburg at the Wallace Civic Center, which I found easily because a friend led me there. Knowing I had to find my way home alone, I paid attention to all the lefts and rights I took. I counted them. I even wrote them down.

But after the show, though I did exactly what I should have done, I lost my way. This is what always happens. Driving to the Cape, I've ended up in Fall River. On the way home from Washington, D.C., I've detoured through Philadelphia. Last spring I even got lost on my way home from Harvard Square.

I need a smart car. I live in a state where Route 128 is Route 95 at one point and Route 93 at another, where north and south are actually the same, where people continually say things like, "You go down the road a way and you pass a White Hen on your left. But don't take that left, take the next left. I forget the name of the street, but you'll see it. If you pass a Getty station, turn around. You've gone too far."

Motorola said its smart car system would be available in some cars by 1993. Well, the 1993 cars are in the showrooms. So where's the talking road map? Where's the magic dashboard? How much longer do we have to wait?