When I enter a new state, a buy a road map of that state. Then I store it under a seat of my van.
Phone battery die, cell signal can be weak. And I can scribble on the map.
It's just a better tool.
Paper map sales are booming
151–160 of 326 posts
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#152In the city I live in, construction, random political initiatives,
broken down infrastructure, temporary closures and on
make paper maps entirely useless.
I used to have a decent map in my head from getting around but that is impossible now.
I do wish Google Maps / Wayze / TomTOm etc updated the maps faster.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#153> His customers, he added, aren’t just looking to maps for directions, but as inspiration for future trips or even as art worth hanging. I think that alone accounts for the vast majority of this increase. The article throws that in as a minor detail but I'd bet money it's the only reason. Of course you don't get as many clicks for "More people are buying maps as art". 2 of the 3 examples of maps they give at the end…
I love National Geographic maps of ancient places. They basically are maps as art.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#154Part of this resurgence can undoubtedly be explained by the ready availability of high quality open geospatial data sources like OpenStreetMap. The United States has always had a lot of open geospatial data available, but it's patchy, can be hard to find, and is of wildly varying quality. In Europe, open (geospatial) data has become the norm, but that wasn't the case even 10 years ago. And in spite of harmonization e…
I live between France and the US.
France has https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/ and IGN topographic map of every square centimeter of the country.
The US has... google map and you can also find some decent topographic map online. It's just way harder to find the paper version. ( must have in my book for hiking and such )
That article actually provide great resources to buy good topographic map of the US. It's been a struggle and a frustration for me.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#155Anybody 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…
Went on a road trip 2 years ago and an older family member went to AAA in socal and got a physical triptik book for the trip.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a side note, hiking is incredibly popular in Hong Kong (mountain sides too steep to practically build residences right in the middle of one of the most densely populated places on Earth). However, Google maps is comically bad for hiking in Hong Kong. For years, the Mt. Butler HF radio station was marked as "gas station". (It's the only gas station I've seen with barbed wire locked gate and signs warning of guard d…
Do people actually try to use Google Maps for hiking? It never occurred to me to even try. I always go to the authority maintaining the hiking trails (NPS, or some state or county agency) and download PDF maps.
Sample size 1: I have tried from time to time. Google seems to have Hong Kong trail maps in its data set, just poor quality as to which trails are passable.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Given a map, can you find where you are in the map without GPS?
How about planning a route from contour plots?
Or maybe figure out which direction you should go without a digital compass?
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
On one hand, I get the concern about this because mechanical clocks still exist, familiarity informs me that they're easy to read, and nostalgia tells me they're important. On the other hand, they are unintuitive, less common with every passing year, and I'd rather my children get any recess than add "learn to use another antiquated tool" into the school curriculum. I do complicated math for a living, but nobody's of…
Ten years after the slide rule calculator came out, the physical slide rules had virtually disappeared. Clock with hands show no signs of disappearing. Sundials on the other hand are safe to ignore.
> Clock with hands show no signs of disappearing.
I can't remember the last time I saw someone with a mechanical watch other than as a fashion statement.
25 years ago, my household had mechanical alarm clocks, a mechanical clock on the oven, and multiple mechanical clocks on the walls of different rooms. Today, I think I might have a broken mechanical watch in my "you should probably fix these things" piles.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#159Anybody 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…
Travel is such an personal thing - it's people in an environment at least somewhat foreign to them. Trusting someone to plan it is a pretty intimate thing, and companies don't do intimate things very well anymore. Too many people, too few companies. I'd pay good money for more personal experiences from companies, especially when it comes to something like this, but it's not easy. The wife and I were looking for a hon…
If it's something like what we had at my country, it's not a travel plan.
It's a book, fully indexed, with searchable and fully reviewed information about the place you are going and the path in between. You use it to make your own plan, or to improvise.
Specifically about improvisation, it has become almost impossible nowadays because there is no reliable information about anything.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#160This is a little tangential, but last year me and my girlfriend went to Greece for the first time. A few days after we purchased the tickets, a book came in the mail. She had ordered a tourism guide for Greece that had some recommendations about what to see, where to eat, where to stay, etc. My first reaction was along the lines of "why would we do this when we have the entire internet? Each section is written by onl…
When Lonely Planet guides were popular, there was a trend of investors buying popular hostels/attractions from the guide and running them into the ground before the next Lonely Planet was published and warned of the demise. I haven't seen this as much lately (maybe due to rise of online reviews), but cross-referencing Lonely Planet with TripAdvisor is the sweet-spot.