If I go hiking in the mountains I'd bring with me a paper map just in case something happens to my phone or I run out of battery. A power bank backups only the battery, not a cracked or lost phone. Never lost a paper map though.
Paper map sales are booming
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Re: Paper map sales are booming
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.gislounge.com/spatial-orientation-and-the-brain-... Studies have shown that people just cannot read maps anymore due to dependence on GPS apps in their daily lives.
That's odd to me. Even when using GPS I'm always looking at the map to figure out what the upcoming turns are because I have zero faith in the accuracy of the voice directions and arrows. Do people just follow the directions without understanding the route on the map?
>Do people just follow the directions without understanding the route on the map?
Most people I know do that.
I almost always look at a preview of the GPS route and try to understand the gist of the directions before I start driving. I build a narrative like "2 left turns, 1 right, then driving for quite awhile before taking an exit". It helps my mental model of the areas of town and how they connect.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a difference between geographic north and magnetic north that can get pretty significant (if you live in NE US, magnetic north about 10-20° west of north). If you're sailing the clipper route, for part of your journey, your magnetic compass now points as far as northwest rather than north.
Hiking in the northeast US, you're generally speaking on trails. I'd certainly encourage people to acquaint themselves with magnetic deviation and so forth. But, especially as a backup mechanism, the main value of a compass is to avoid having absolutely no idea what direction you're going.
In my recent hiking experience, a lot of trails in the NE--even in popular parks--are pretty poorly marked, and these days, virtually every hiking trip involves at least one point where the trail makes a sharp curve, but there's something that looks trail-ish that continues ahead, and it's only a few hundred feet down the line that you realize you might have missed the trail.
The little handheld trail GPS my parents got me after my first such misadventure has proven incredibly useful for figuring out where I made the wrong move. (The first such misadventure, I was using the paper map to work out if there was a bend I missed).
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#104Anybody remember Triptiks from AAA? You'd go to a AAA office or call them on the phone, tell them where you were going, and in return you'd get a printed spiral top-bound pad with your trip broken down in to multiple legs, the roads/routes pre-highlighted, gas stops and prices estimated in, a list of sites for stopping off at, etc. All human curated and human annotated (the roads on your route were literally gone ove…
Old-school AAA TripTik® Walkthrough [0]
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#105I have seen maps of Boston since forever, but it was not until using Google Maps to navigate that I realized some parts of Boston I assumed were not well connected are in fact conveniently driveable.
I suspect this boom is like describing cassette sales as "booming." Supposedly sales doubled in 2021.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#106Fact number one: with the connected supercomputer, gps, camera, audio recorder etc in our hands travel gets upgraded (at least in principle) not one but several levels, from the mundane and practical to the sublime
Fact number two: the tangible, tactile reality, longevity, versatility, privacy, artistic beauty of a well made map or travel guide cannot be replicated, certainly not by the crappy websites that have come to dominate this space
Conclusion. We have two legs. Walking and hiking is better if we use them both :-)
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#107[deleted]
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#108Something I find really fun when traveling in the car with kids is to give them a paper map and ask them to plan a route a for us to get to our destination. Then when you're driving ask them to follow along and give the directions. Obviously they can't be too young and they're not going to be perfect, but if you have a child around 7-13 they'll probably find this quite fun. Being able to use a map is one of those ski…
The flippant attitude that people have towards map-reading today is appalling. Maybe its the eagle scout in me but how can someone NOT want to learn to read a map? It isn't even that hard! What happens if your device fails you?
I've always been a bit surprised by the sentence "learn to read a map". What is there to learn exactly?
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#109I buy paper Ordnance Survey maps because they come with a scratch-off code to get the map in their digital app. You can also pay an annual subscription of about 50 quid to get coverage of the whole UK, but for my usage, which is limited to fairly small geographic areas, I prefer to pay the 8 or 9 quid each for the paper maps covering the areas I care about, which then gets me access to that map forever, rather than h…
You can access OS maps on Bing maps. Both Landranger and Explorer. I used to use streetmap.co.uk for this purpose but recently discovered Bing has them too. Useful for areas where I don't want to buy the map yet.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#110Maps are an art form. There will always be a market for beautiful maps as art objects.