Rouen directions are not very good, very hard to follow

Ahhh The typical Rouen experience :)

Even locals get lost in Rouen. I know people who lived there for 5 years and not only could they not explain how to find their house, they occasionally claimed they never got home the same way twice

Who did you get the walk from?

I can distinctly remember going round and round Rouen looking for the parking garage of the Mércure hotel - and eventually parking and walking around on foot until I found it.

As Simon said, typical for Rouen.

Probably the streets would have aligned if you had found the correct starting point.....

Sorry you got lost.

Likewise with getting lost in Rouen. Last summer I did a day trip there from Paris, a well spent day , departed from Paris St. Lazare. No trouble walking from the station to the centre ville, stopping , exploring, and taking numerous pictures. Not only was my purpose to see the architecture of this famous city but a French had told me specifically of Rouen's Napoleon statue , not only an ordinary monument but one on horseback.

I visited the Tourist Office, a good habit always to check it out if I came across it. Very helpful staff and approachable but I noticed the girl did not switch over to English as she heard talking the halting French. I was less that a couple of minutes from it.

Walking back , retracing my path to the train station is when I got lost but then I was doing that with no phone, no google map or a paper one.

Finally, I decided to ask a guy, wasn't always sure I understood his French, he led me to a Metro station. Bottom line: I had walked too far and overshot the train station.

Last month, we arrived in Rouen (driving a rental car) from Bayeux on a Friday early evening at what shocked me...rush hour. Terrible traffic. Our built in GPS in our new BMW rental sent us various wrong ways, and we looped and circled, turned right when we should go left, wait is this one way... trying to get near our AirBnB, when out of nowhere we passed the suggested overnight parking lot our Airbnb host has recommended. We shouted out a thank you and parked the car, and never pulled it out until we departed early Sunday morning when everyone was blissfully asleep and not on the road. (We live in So Cal. It's not like we don't know traffic. We just were not expecting what we got ourselves into.)

I didn't have any trouble walking in Rouen, but driving was a problem. We needed to return a car to the train station underground garage. Google maps took us to the front of the train station, but it took us 20 minutes of driving around trying to find the garage entrance. There are so many one way streets. We were late getting the car back.

I’ll second visiting the TI office. Last year when we stopped there I mentioned Monet and the cathedral to the young lady helping us. She asked us to wait a minute while she got a key, and took us up to the room where Monet stayed and painted in as he worked on his cathedral series.

The whole walk needs to be much clearer handed in sooner than your map

You write this as if you're addressing it directly to Rick Steves. Just so you know, he never reads the forum so you haven't left a comment he'll ever know about. If you want to leave feedback that someone in his company might eventually see use the page https://www.ricksteves.com/europe/guidebook-updates

I don't see a walk in the RS audio tours for Rouen. Maybe this is about a walking tour that RS has in the guides for some cities. I like those walking tours and almost always do them. However, the map for the walking tour does not always have all the streets. I wouldn't expect it to. In some ways, the walking tours are more a rough sketch. I always do the walking tours with a city map in hand.

Had not issues with walking around in Rouen but driving is a serious challenge there. Practiced at home with google streetview for having an idea how to drive to one of the underground parkings close to the cathedral. And it really helped.

I simply followed my iPhone going to my hotel in downtown Rouen. I was sure I did something wrong because I found myself driving in what appeared to be a pedestrian-only area. Then lo and behold, there was the garage door for underground parking. So it all was correct, but it didn't look like it. To get out I had to enter a code on a keypad to lower a retractable safety bollard blocking my exit.

We purposely left our parking ticket in our car while parked deep down in an underground parking structure. We figured it would be easier to find that way. So on a quiet Sunday morning when we were departing we found we didn’t have access to the parking structure entrance door because we needed the ticket. So we had to walk in to the driveway exit, underneath the arm, and wind around and down the narrow driveway while rolling our suitcases. Rouen was full of charm except for the driving and parking!