I am looking for assistance in developing a program that will allow me
to enter my location in a particular city as well as my destination in
that same city -- at which time the computer will merely give me the
quickest route to reach my destination.
[ ... ]
I am fairly new to the world of GIS and I would appreciate email from
anyone who is either interested in working with me on this project or
any suggestions on where I should begin to look (ie, do I use data from
Tiger or Grass, does it make sense to develop such a program from
scratch, etc.).
Well, considering that several multinational consortia are
working on this problem with astronomical budgets, I think
developing this from scratch does not make an awful lot
of sense (this is the situaution in Europe, I don't know
about the US, but I'd be surprised if the situation was very
much different - apart from the multinational bit, perhaps 
While the algorithmical side of the thing is far from trivial,
the main problem is a current database. This is where the big
money comes in. There have been a couple of articles on this
topic in GIS Europe over the last two or three years.
Good luck,
Martin
--
Martin Ameskamp, Inst. f. Informatik I (Computing Dept.)
Kiel University, Olshausenstr. 40, 24118 Kiel, Germany
Fax: ++49 431 8804054, Voice: ++49 431 8804474,
ma@informatik.uni-kiel.de, URL http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~ma/