Forget Tellme's voice driven directions, Yahoo's turn-by-turn directions, or those stupid big maps that don't give you any data on the small turns. Today I stumbled on MapBlast's beta information layout for directions and I really like it.

In addition to giving text step-by-step directions, it makes a diagram that is not to scale labelling all the relevant roads, showing their orientational relationships, and labelling their names and the distances to go on each. In my opinion, this single graphic is more useful than every other bit of information you can get from any source. It looks like something straight from the mind of Tufte.

In the example below, I'm trying to get from Concord, CA to Seattle, WA, an 800 mile journey. This is the chart MapBlast's new interface provides (click to enlarge):

To try for yourself, go to MapBlast, get your directions the usual way, then click on the big button labeled "Try our new directions".

It's really nice to see one of the myriad of navigation sites actually doing some intelligent legwork to improve the final product.