Two words: Google Earth.
If your story takes place in current, real world locations that you've never been to, look them up on Google Earth. It's not just a map. It lets you walk through the streets from the viewpoint of a person/car instead of a topographical view (but there are topographical views, too, and they're all sattelite images, not drawings). This is the most amazing tool for story setting research. Please use it so you can get a realistic idea of the setting your characters are running around in, instead of making things up or guessing.
In Twilight, Bella's mom lived in the city of Jacksonville, and Meyer stated how there were beaches and such in her back yard. Someone looked it up, and lo-and-behold, they found that the "beaches" were non-existant. Don't lose your credibility by putting important structures and landmarks in the wrong spots (for example, your character is in New York and traveling from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx in just five minutes, when realistically, the two locations are miles apart).
Back to the wonders of Google Earth, you can go from touring the Eiffel Tower to the Grand Canyon to MARS. (I'm seriously on streetview on the planet Mars. What.)
For me, Stray is set in Connecticut near Yale University, but I've never been there. So I used Google Earth to find a nice woodsy area with big-looking houses near Yale to position Annie's house. By using Google Maps, I found the driving time from that location to Yale and to her high school.
It's really an invaluable tool, so please download and use it! I've even linked to it in the External Link if you're too lazy to Google it.
And even if you don't want to use it for your stories, it's really awesome for driving directions because you can "drive" through the path and see a full 3-d panorama of the entire journey with most buildings and streets labeled.
(Someone found an escaped convict running around on Google Street View, might I add. The screenshot is in the sidebar.)
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Yuffie's Writing How-To's
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