ok....crash course in illustrator!!
First off, always do what the answer above me suggests. Always sketch out thumbnails and mock-ups. Illustrator will not read your mind and spit out what you need, and this will always give a 'road map' (pardon the pun) of what you are trying to accomplish, as well as getting your creative wheels turning.
I assume you know how to make the image the size you want, and if you don't, you can adjust this by going to
file>document setup. But I think you're wondering more about the tools and how to get something to look like a yahoo driving map.
Get out your tools windows....Window>Tools. At the top there are two arrows....one white and one black. These are your 'selection' tools, and allow you to select objects in your doc. The black one selects objects, and the white one selects points and paths of the vector image. Just worry about the black one for now. Once you make a line or text or a shape, this arrow will allow you to select it and move it, resize it, or change the fill/stroke.
In the next section of tools, you have the pen tool, type tool, line tool, shape tool, brush tool, and your pencil tool, and most of these have multiple variations within the tools (notice the little arrow on the bottom of each button). After looking at a yahoo driving map, I decided that you'll mostly be using the line, shape, pen, and type tool.
Look down near the bottom of your tools pallet, and you'll notice two boxes (default is a white one on top of a black outlined one). These are your fill and stroke for an object. once you make a shape and select it, you can adjust the color of the fill and stroke (stoke meaning outline).
I'd start building your map from the bottom up. Start with the city blocks and background objects, then move to your streets, then the specific road names and numbers and what-not. Each of these could be made on different layers, so you could lock them and move on to the next.
Again, this is a super-quick crash course, but it'll get you started and you can mess around and figure out a lot on your own. A few hints, tho:
Command + Z will undo your last move, and you can keep hitting it as many times as you need to go back.
When you are making a line, with either your pen or line tools, holding shift will let you place the line at 45 degree increments...0, 45, 90, 135, etc....and holding shift while dragging out a shape will make it a perfect shape....a perfect square or circle.
Hope this helps. It's a tremendous program and I could walk you through stuff for hours, but this will get you started!
It's awesome!! have fun!!!