Maps/Atlases

[SSOWorld]

I've always wondered why cities like Prescott, Bullhead City, Sierra Vista, AZ, Branson, MO have their own maps in the Rand McNally atlas (Likely because of being tourist attractions I bet)

Prescott - no idea
Bullhead City - Laughlin NV's accross the border
Sierra Vista - Tombstone/OK Corral nearby
Branson - well, it's the Las Vegas/NYC of the Midwest

I also wonder why National Park insets often don't show a larger view than the main map itself, esp with California's parks (Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia), Crater Lake, Mount Rainier, and Glacier

And what's with the Black Hills region in SD?

At one point they did an inset of the Outer Banks of NC - but that was dropped after a couple years.

[Chris]

I have an '87 edition which has only a third of the pages they have now. And that's also a Large Scale one.

[Tom]

I've read the 2011 Rand McNally Road Atlas shows the old routing for U.S. Route 66 (shows a gray box with US-66 shield inside of it).

[Chris]

http://store.randmcnally.com/road-atlas/rand-mcnally-road-atlases.html

2012 Rand McNally will be available from April 5th.

[kurumi]

About 40 CT official maps dating to 1930 (http://www.kurumi.com/roads/maps/ctofficial.html), about 40 New England oil company maps from c. 1926 to the 1960s, and possibly 100 other maps, miscellaneous, US states, NZ, Singapore, etc.

Notable maps include a Japanese Atlas ("Super Mapple") purchased in Shinjuku, a CT Tercentenary map with about 20 errors (e.g. CT 160 marked as CT 60), and a 49-state atlas issued in 1959 (with CT's portion about the size of a thumbprint).

[ftballfan]

I have a lot of old oil company and official state maps ranging from the early 1960s into the 1980s. And also some old Rand McNally atlases, like 1978 and 1990.

[mightyace]

I just picked up a number of things at a Borders store that is closing in Cool Springs.

Rand McNally:
Johnson City, Bristol and Kingsport Street Guide (1st Edition, 2008) - useful on Bristol race trips
Knoxville Street Guide (4th Edition, 2008) - also useful on Bristol trips

American Map:
Chattanooga (2008)
Chicagoland Seven County (2008)
Memphis (2008)

Handy Map of Nashville, TN (2005 Edition)

All were brand new and just $4.99 each except for the Chicagoland one which was $3.00!

and last but not least

GIS for Dummies

[Landshark]

I have a whole drawer full of just maps.  My dad collected maps, so I had a nice head start.

DeLorme Atlases - Alaska, Washington (x3), Oregon, Northern California, Southern California, Montana, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire, Maine, Florida

Benchmark (I love these!) - Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona

Rand McNally -  dozens of road atlases from the 70's through 2011 and a box of city maps (most west coast mid and large cities, dozens of larger eastern cities)

AAA (I get my $'s worth from just the free maps!) - dozen of states, most west coast cities (inc. maps from 70's and 80's), dozens of cities in rest of the US

Official Natl. Park Maps - Olympic, Mt. Rainier, Yellowstone, Glacier

State DOT maps - WA, OR (incl. a '38), MT, NY, PA

Other maps - King of the Road (west coast cities), Trakker (Orlando), GM Johnson (NW cities), Gousha (NE cities),  MapArt (British Columba cities), UniversalMap (Denver, Scottsdale), Visual Encyclopia (Pburgh), ADC (Philly), Patton's (Philly), Chevron (WA & OR, pre-Interstate)

[Michael in Philly]

Here's sad news:  what may be (or have been) the best map store in the Northeast is closing:

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/cambridge/2011/06/the_globe_corner_store_closing.html?comments=all

And I just happen to have planned a trip up there next week....

[1995hoo]

I don't keep many maps around because we just don't  have space for them and we don't need them in the car due to the sat-navs. I keep a 2005 Rand McNally atlas that I use to highlight the roads I've travelled in North America (at least, the roads significant enough to appear in the atlas). I had a French roommate one year of law school who had a map of the USA that he used in that manner and that's where I got the idea. I enjoy looking at old maps to see what has changed in what period of time, though.

[agentsteel53]

I always use maps for my strategic navigation - a GPS will tell me that the fastest way to get from here to Portland is to take I-5.  It will not tell me that I can take US-97 and then cross back across the Cascades on OR-58 as a scenic option.  But if I look at a map, I can see the big picture and plan out a routing which takes me to places I have not yet been.

[1995hoo]

I always use maps for my strategic navigation - a GPS will tell me that the fastest way to get from here to Portland is to take I-5.  It will not tell me that I can take US-97 and then cross back across the Cascades on OR-58 as a scenic option.  But if I look at a map, I can see the big picture and plan out a routing which takes me to places I have not yet been.

I sometimes look at maps online for that, or the atlas I mentioned. Thankfully, though, the sat-nav in my car is not solely touchscreen-operated–it's built in and has a joystick as well, so when I'm in stopped traffic or stopped a red light I've sometimes zoomed it out and moved it around to figure out alternates. Being able to do that has proven a lot more valuable than the touchscreen ones when we've been stuck in traffic in unfamiliar areas. But yeah, in terms of figuring out an overall new route and how the roads relate to each other a sat-nav isn't really an adequate replacement for conventional maps. I tend to use Google Maps quite a bit in advance for just that sort of reason.

[agentsteel53]

which GPS do you have?  I've got a TomTom One and, while it is more than adequate for last-mile navigation (that winding set of residential streets for which even my state atlas doesn't have the details), it is cumbersome to try to bring up, and use, the pan and scan feature, so I never do, grabbing the map instead.

[1995hoo]

which GPS do you have?  I've got a TomTom One and, while it is more than adequate for last-mile navigation (that winding set of residential streets for which even my state atlas doesn't have the details), it is cumbersome to try to bring up, and use, the pan and scan feature, so I never do, grabbing the map instead.

My Acura has the built-in device that was an option on the third-generation (2004—08) TL. My wife has a Garmin and that device is not at all useful for trying to pan around because it's solely a touchscreen. The joystick on mine makes it a bit easier. True, it's still not necessarily the easiest way to plan in advance, but it's served me pretty well on trips–last summer, for example, we got stuck in a backup on I-70 in Pennsylvania en route to Bedford. Using the joystick made it easy to determine that there was a back road at the next exit that would eventually connect through to the Breezewood area, so we went that way. The people who had exclusively touch-screens evidently couldn't scroll around as easily and I didn't see any of them going the same way.

Picture of my dashboard taken a few years ago. The joystick is the round silver thing below the sat-nav screen. I use either the joystick or the voice-controls because I don't like smudging up the screen with fingerprints. (Obviously the map can zoom in a lot closer than it's set in this picture.)

[froggie]

Forget GPS.  DeLorme is my friend.  SatNav is useful for creating a track of where you've been going (I have a handheld GPS that I use for such a purpose, whether bike/hike trips or roadtrips), but it's less than useful if your destination is random and/or doesn't involve a major highway.

[agentsteel53]

Forget GPS.  DeLorme is my friend.  SatNav is useful for creating a track of where you've been going (I have a handheld GPS that I use for such a purpose, whether bike/hike trips or roadtrips), but it's less than useful if your destination is random and/or doesn't involve a major highway.

it is incredibly useful for that last mile.  I don't use it as much for roadgeeking purposes, but when I have to get to someone's house and they live in one of those 1970s neighborhoods that is a twisty little maze of passages, all alike ...

[1995hoo]

Forget GPS.  DeLorme is my friend.  SatNav is useful for creating a track of where you've been going (I have a handheld GPS that I use for such a purpose, whether bike/hike trips or roadtrips), but it's less than useful if your destination is random and/or doesn't involve a major highway.

it is incredibly useful for that last mile.  I don't use it as much for roadgeeking purposes, but when I have to get to someone's house and they live in one of those 1970s neighborhoods that is a twisty little maze of passages, all alike ...

It's useful for a couple of other things as well, I think, such as finding nearby ATMs or gas stations (I'd rather just hit the button and say "Find nearest ATM" than screw around with a cell phone) and for backup while driving–you know, if you hit a traffic jam in an unfamiliar place you can hit the button and say "Detour" and it will give an alternate route without having to mess around with a map while in traffic. Of course the alternate route isn't always ideal–there are some back roads the thing just inexplicably refuses to use. But often those back roads don't show up on any map that I'd be likely to have around anyway.

But the point about planning out an overall trip using a more conventional map, or something like Google Maps if you don't have a paper one handy, is certainly very valid. One thing I like with Google Maps as opposed to the sat-nav is that you can drag the route around to select different roads to get a sense for how much longer or shorter it estimates your trip will be. My wife isn't particularly tolerant of long side trips taken solely for the purpose of going a different way, so I like to have an idea of time and distance because I have a sense for the limits of what she'll put up with at any given time. (Obviously there are exceptions for detours in case of roadwork or traffic or the like, but if I go 150 miles out of the way just for the sake of clinching a road or something like that it's about as welcome as a fart in church.)

[agentsteel53]

I do like the ability of Google Maps to drag the route around to estimate distances - but it shares, with the GPS, the absence of "seeing the forest instead of the trees".  I can either zoom in and get details, or I can get a very undetailed big picture, but not both, which I seem to be able to do when I look at a printed page of a map which shows an entire state.

[PAHighways]

My Acura has the built-in device that was an option on the third-generation (2004—08) TL. My wife has a Garmin and that device is not at all useful for trying to pan around because it's solely a touchscreen. The joystick on mine makes it a bit easier. True, it's still not necessarily the easiest way to plan in advance, but it's served me pretty well on trips–last summer, for example, we got stuck in a backup on I-70 in Pennsylvania en route to Bedford. Using the joystick made it easy to determine that there was a back road at the next exit that would eventually connect through to the Breezewood area, so we went that way.

You got to experience some of old PA 126, if the route you took went right into Breezewood.

[1995hoo]

Yup, it was indeed old PA-126. Nice diversion. We got off I-70 at the Amaranth exit and eventually got back on at Crystal Springs instead of going all the way to Breezewood. 

What it really boils down to for me is just not having a good place to store a lot of paper maps. So I've learned to adjust to other ways.

[brownpelican]

I don't have near the number of maps today than I had back from 1999-2004 (I was going between Jackson, Miss., The Bay Area and Upstate South Carolina). At the peak, I had the 1999 and 2003 Rand McNally atlases, 1999 versions of every Thomas Map available of the Bay Area (GOOD.ASS.MAPS), 1999 maps of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas, a late 80s Exxon map of New Orleans/Roads to New Orleans (Ark.-La.-Miss-W. Ala.-E. Texas), a Jackson, Miss. city map from a local phone book (Not BellSouth), maps of South Carolina and the cities of Greenwood, Greenville, Anderson and Columbia.

Now, I have the 2010 Rand McNally atlas, state maps of Oklahoma, Missouri, Arizona, Arkansas, Michigan, Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Wisconsin; city maps of Houston, Baton Rouge (including one from 1987), New Orleans, Hammond, La.; and St. Tammany Parish, La. My dad has large posterized maps of Baton Rouge from the mid- to late 80s...and I want to find them.

I remember throwing away a gem back in high school: A late 70s or early 80s Allstate Motor Club road map with route to North Carolina highlighted.

[mjb2002]

I have state maps of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I also have an atlas that have every state and providence in North America.

I am not a big fan of state-wide maps and atlases, though, because they do not have enough detail.

I also have one atlas of the highways and streets of North Carolina's counties and three atlases containing information for all 46 of South Carolina's counties. Those maps have better detail than state-wide atlases and maps, but does not have local sidestreets in most cases.

So, I primarily collect county maps.

Every county map I have, except for three of them, are from South Carolina.

I have two maps of Augusta-Richmond County, Ga. and one of Savannah-Chatham County, Ga. -- which also includes Hilton Head Island.

I have maps of Aiken County (5), Barnwell County (3), Lexington County, Richland County, Orangeburg County (5), Dorchester County, Berkeley County, Florence County, Horry County (2), Beaufort County (3), Hampton County, Colleton County (2), Spartanburg County, and Anderson County.

I also have city maps of Augusta, Ga.; North Augusta; Barnwell; Blackville; Williston (2); Denmark; Bamberg; Greenville; Columbia; Charleston; and Myrtle Beach.