Others are
marked as coincident with a feature such as a road, although how one
is supposed to recognize one road among others is not explained (in
the Phoenix TAC that I'm looking at, the entire area is crisscrossed
with a grid of streets; I'm not sure how I'd distinguish Camelback
Road from the other nearly identical streets to the north and south of
it.

Being a pilot in the Phoenix area I can at least help you out with that
one.
Camelback road can easily be identified by it's proximity to Camelback
mountain,
(from where it gets it's name) , and the mountain is easily identified
by it's shape
(take a wild guess as to what that is !). The other streets to the
north and south
are less easily identified, unless you are familiar with the area,
however they
can be identified by the locations of the high rise buildings. Most of
these are
clustered around central avenue, the uptown ones begin near Thomas,
the downtown
ones are noticeably seperated to the south. One comment I have to make
here is
it seems you ask these questions from a belief that pilots just take
off and go buzzing
around with no prior thought or preflight planning. I can assure you
that in the cases
of myself and the pilots I know, this is not the case. I am a
helicopter pilot so making
in flight measurements with a ruler/plotter is pretty much
impossible(rule of thumb works
for unexpected situations) but the point I am trying to make here is
that most pilots
don't just take off without already knowing where they are going and
how they are going to
get there. We can't plan for all the eventualities (oh look at that!
and a sightseeing detour
happens), but we must know where we are to know if said detour will be
feasible or not.
Most maps if you look closely enough will have a pretty clearly defined
vfr waypoint on them,
that you can use to identify your location on the map, (in Phoenix look
for the Beeline
Y or ASU or train tracks along Grand avenue or Boswell hospital on the
west side.


In short I guess what I'm trying to say is if you are unfamiliar with
an area, it simply
means that your preflight planning will, by necessity be more thorough.


Wayne
CPI-RTC