Proposal I'm going to send into Rand McNally to make the Mexico road map better

[US 41]

So here's my proposal. I would expand the map to pages 128 and 129. This would reduce the scale from 1 inch equals 145 miles to 1 inch equals 73 miles. On page 130 there would be inset maps of 12 Mexican cities. This idea would only add one page to the atlas. Below are the cities I am wanting to request.

Locks
Mexico City
Guadalajara
Monterrey
Acapulco
Cancun

Should be included
San Luis Potosi
Chihuahua
Torreon / Gomez Palacio

On the bubble
Mazatlan
Durango
Hermosillo
Saltillo

Didn't make the cut
Puebla
Aguascalientes
Zacatecas
Juarez
Reynosa
Tijuana

For obvious reasons I think that Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey should have insets. They're the three largest cities, so I think that is a no brainer. I put Cancun and Acapulco as locks since they are big tourist destinations.

San Luis Potosi, Chihuahua, and Torreon I feel are well deserving of insets. With the exception of Chihuahua, these cities are very major crossing points for some very major highways in Mexico.

Now I'll explain how I chose Mazatlan, Hermosillo, Durango, and Saltillo over the cities that "didn't make the cut". I didn't include border cities like Reynosa, Juarez, and Tijuana since you can basically look at a map of California or Texas and figure out how to get through them. I didn't include Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, and Puebla because I feel like they are just too far south. Looking at the driving times map in the back of the atlas I feel like it is more important to include northern cities than cities further south because I feel like that would benefit the most people.

Anyways there's my idea. Whether Rand McNally accepts my idea or not is entirely up to them (I'm aware that they most likely won't). What are your thoughts on my idea?

[7/8]

I always thought it was ridiculous how small they make Mexico. What's the point of including it if you put the entire country on a single page? I personally wouldn't mind the extra page this would take

But then again, if you're really driving to Mexico, it would probably be worth it to get a Mexico-only road atlas. I find the Canada section of Rand McNally lacking, so I personally get a CCC atlas for Canada to accompany my Rand McNally for the U.S.

[Avalanchez71]

Isn't too dangerous for an American to drive past the border towns?  Don't you have to obtain insurance specifc in Mexico to drive?

There are so many reasons to make Mexico a one pager.

[vdeane]

I'm pretty sure it's the border towns that are dangerous, not the interior.

[jeffandnicole]

You would actually have to expand the entire atlas by 4 pages, not 2, due to its creased folding method with a few staples.  So now you have 2 other pages to play with.   Their versions of atlases that have spiral binders can be expanded by 2 pages only.

That said, I'm sure atlas sales are falling.  They're probably looking at ways to cut costs...which would mean fewer pages.

[briantroutman]

Don't you have to obtain insurance specifc in Mexico to drive?

Yes, nearly all (if not all) US auto insurance policies do not cover you in Mexico, so you'd need to buy Mexico-specific coverage. If you're an AAA member, offices in border states will typically offer you limited term liability policies.

I've driven all over the US, Canada, and Europe–including the UK–and had no qualms about doing so. But I have no desire to drive in Mexico. I think if you surveyed the people who buy the Rand McNally atlas, very few of them are interested in driving there either.

My opinion: It's astonishing that Rand McNally is still printing a paper atlas for wide distribution at all (though I'm glad they are), and also surprising that they have any coverage of Mexico at all. I wouldn't even waste the time, paper, and postage to try to petition them. Don't they sell a Mexico atlas? Why not just buy that?

[SP Cook]

I always considered the Mexico map just a toss in so RM (and other map makers) could say "USA-Canada-Mexico" on the cover.  It is not adequate for travel there (and if you were just going to do a trip to a nearby border town, the maps TX, NM, AZ or CA would be better than the one of Mexico), and the expansion you propose would not be adequate either.

Amazon lists a 160 page atlas for $20, which appears to be a grey market import, I'm sure one could get it at the first Wal-Mart de Mexico you come to for less.  I have no idea what a GPS does south of the border (other than get you lost just like here).  My particular car (which was made in Puebla, Mexico) does not seem to have anything in the menu that mentions Mexico (it does for Canada) but I have never had it anywhere near the border so I don't know.

As to the insurance question, yes, US and Canadian insurance is totally void in Mexico.  You have to buy Mexican insurance.  There are companies that sell it for a week or two, or for longer periods.  You also have to fill out paperwork and pay a depost to insure that you take the car back home, since Mexican sales taxes are very high and it used to be common for people to take a car down and sell it for cash

Everytime I have been in Mexico, and this is way down south not just border towns, I have always seen multiple US plated cars, including quite nice models, and not always driven by people who appear to be Mexicans.  I really cannot imagine driving a nice car on a vacation that deep into a less developed country.  Then again, the people who live across the street from my daughter have a VW Caddy pickup, which is not sold in the US.  With Kentucky plates.  How the heck they got that registered is beyond me.

[SSOWorld]

Going beyond a zone around the border requires you register your car as an import to eliminate the risk of confiscation.  The road system is also far from ideal.

[US 41]

I just sent them an email Friday suggesting some updates to the Mexico map. Here's the updates I suggested.

1) Label MX 57 from Saltillo down to MX 80 as a 4 lane highway (orange) rather than a 2 lane highway (red).

2) Label MX 54 from the Coah/Zac border to Cd Zacatecas as a 4 lane highway (orange) rather than a 2 lane highway (red).

3) Add a MX 24 shield on MX 24 (shown in gray) between Parral and Cd Chihuahua. (It currently is not labeled at all.)

I did not suggest making the map 2 pages, but I figured these updates would at least make the map somewhat better, assuming they do them. They did respond and said that they were sending my email to the map research team.

[kphoger]

Isn't too dangerous for an American to drive past the border towns?  Don't you have to obtain insurance specifc in Mexico to drive?

There are so many reasons to make Mexico a one pager.

My family and I have driven approximately 6000 miles in Mexico over the last ten years, in five states.  Yes, you have to purchase Mexican insurance, which can be done ahead of time online or by phone, or you find an agent near the border to purchase a policy from in person when you arrive.  Traveling past the border zone requires obtaining a tourist card and temporarily importing your vehicle to Mexico, which in turn requires a deposit and some paperwork; this has never taken me more than 1.5 hours at the border, even with groups as large as twelve people and three vehicles, although peak travel times would obvious cause longer lines.

If a map is worthless to navigation, as the one-page Mexico map in Rand McNally is, then why include it at all?  It's pointless.  In fact, the most recent RMN I bought was the large-scale one, which does not include Canada or México at all.  If I need to look something up in a Mexican atlas, I pull out my Guía Roji instead.

As for danger, the short answer is no.  The slightly longer answer is that danger is all relative, so it depends what you're comparing Mexico to.  I wrote a much longer answer a couple of months ago in preparation for the mission trip we led a couple of weeks ago, and I include a large portion here below for you to read:

It has been some time since I last gave an update on crime in Mexico.  As many of you are aware, I have been researching the matter since our family's very first trip to Parras back in 2009.  It was shortly before that time that the escalation in organized crime violence first started making American headlines, and so I have had a keen eye on the situation ever since.  Over these several years, I have attempted to maintain objectivity, eschewing news articles and personal anecdotes in favor of official government data.  The news, of course, thrives on shock value, which means stability and peace go unreported while violence and crime are portrayed in a very negative light; I am constantly amazed at how unbalanced a view of things we are given by the media.  But first, some history.

Drug trafficking has long been a part of Mexican culture.  For decades, the drug trade was simply accepted as a part of the Mexican identity.  Many saw it as a necessary evil, but others less unfavorably.  In fact, it was a way of life for many families and continued in relative peace for quite some time.  This relative peace was accomplished in part by a corrupt, highly centralized government.  From 1929 until 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won every presidential election, most times by a very wide (if fraudulent) margin.  The PRI was famous for fraud and corruption, and officials made a practice of accepting bribes from the drug cartels and adopting a relaxed attitude toward their activities.  Every so often, the government would raid a property, kill a cartel leader, make a show of force to remind everyone who was boss; the rest of the time, though, the cartels were allowed a long leash.  At the same time, the PRI being a political monolith, also had a national-level, top-down view of things.  This allowed those same corrupt officials to maintain some stability by keeping cartels in their respective territories:  the Gulf Cartel operating along the northern Gulf coast, the Sinaloa Cartel operating in and near the state of Sinaloa, and likewise.  In other words, those long leashes could be shortened as necessary to maintain balance.  It was an imperfect system, but it worked.  In the 1990s, though, Colombia no longer held its longstanding position at the top of the drug trade, the drug war in that nation having destroyed the big cartels there, and the Mexican cartels began to enjoy more power and exert more influence than ever before.

Then, in 2000, the amazing happened:  for the first time in 71 years, the PRI lost the election.  In that year, by a margin of 7%, the more conservative National Action Party (PAN) won with its candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada.  This was to be the beginning of something new:  the government structure would be less centralized, corrupt officials would be ousted from office, and Mexico would take a stand against the drug trade.  Two important situations then developed as a result:  the stakes were higher for the cartels to maintain power, and the government was simultaneously both less able and less willing to maintain equilibrium.  The next election was won by fellow PAN candidate Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, who immediately upon election sent several thousand troops to Ciudad Juarez to stamp out drug violence there.  That action in December 2006 can be regarded as the real beginning of Mexico's war on drugs, and it is the point at which violent crime in Mexico began to increase sharply.

Because Mexico was a relatively peaceful nation at that time, not having seen an overall homicide rate of more than 15 per 100,000 population since the mid-90s, the numbers were not alarming at first.  By the time we were first making plans to visit the children's home in Parras, however, the trend was apparent and the violence in Mexico was making headlines here in America.  Our loved ones were worried for our safety, and so I began my research on the matter.  One big breakthrough happened in 2011 and again the following year, when the PGR (the Attorney General of the Republic of Mexico) released detailed data about exactly where and when narco-related deaths had occurred.  This has been an invaluable resource:  I have at my disposal a nationwide picture of Mexican drug violence, broken down by county (municipio) and by month, for a period of four and half years.  I have also made use of data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico (INEGI) and research by Harvard University mathematician Viridiana Rios.

What I most want to say on the matter is this:  the more I've learned, the more confident I've become in the safety of traveling to Mexico.  And this has been a constant thing.  Every year I learn more, every year the picture becomes clearer, and every year I find less and less reason to worry.

Perhaps the most important place to start is by putting Mexico in its global context.  It may surprise some to learn that North and South America constitute the most violent region in the world, with an overall murder rate of more than five times that of Europe and Asia.  Within our two continents, there is a considerably wide range in violence from nation to nation.  The USA and Canada lie on the peaceful end of the spectrum (with murder rates of 3.8 and 1.4 per 100,000 respectively), several Central American nations lie at the violent end (Honduras routinely tops 80 per 100,000 lately), and Mexico lies slap-dab in the middle of the pack (at 18.9 per 100,000 in 2013 and declining).  Mexico's murder rate during the drug war has never topped 25 per 100,000 population in any given year, making it still less violent than Jamaica (39.3), the Bahamas (29.8), Brazil (25.2), and even the US territory of Puerto Rico (26.5).  The numbers are comparable, in fact, to Louisiana.  Why do we give little thought to travel in these other places? except that they are still relatively peaceful and not worth our worry.  So why the spotlight on Mexico?  I think the reason is manifold, and I'd like to elaborate on a few of those now.

First of all, we either forget or don't know that Mexico was a peaceful nation starting out, with crime rates not much higher than Missouri in 2007.  We therefore assume that a "huge spike" in crime must equal huge numbers.  But really, that's a false assumption:  the huge spike merely raised the numbers from the low end of average to the high end of average.  Secondly, we are unaware of the crime rates right here in our own back yard, and so we have nothing against which to compare.  111 American citizens were killed in Mexico in 2010; is that high or low?  Without any sort of standard, we tend to think it must be high.  But allow me to actually do the numbers.  According to the US Department of State, there were approximately 1 million Americans living as residents in Mexico.  This equates to an overall rate among American residents in Mexico of 11.1 per 100,000 population, which is precisely the same as the 12-year average for Topeka between 2003 and 2014.  And that's not even counting the 7 million US visitors to Mexico who are not residents there.  111 sounds like an awful lot, until you realize it's really low.  Thirdly, we paint all of Mexico with a broad brush.  We all know that some neighborhoods in Wichita are more dangerous than others, and we all know that some cities are more dangerous than others, and yet for some reason we don't think in those terms when it comes to another country.  As an example, the city of East Saint Louis (IL) has an average murder rate of more than 60 per 100,000 population, and topped 100 for the year in 2007 and again in 2014.  Our family lived in Herrin (IL) in 2007, but you would have been crazy to tell someone not to visit us there because of the violence in a city 100 miles away.  The reality in Mexico is that about 40% of organized crime killings between 2006 and 2010 took place in just ten counties (municipios), and more than half of the counties saw literally zero increase in violence over the same period of time.  Lastly, we only ever hear the bad and never hear the good.  Cities like Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo experience reasonably low crime rates most of the time, punctuated by occasional spats of violence; news agencies report on the violence but, of course, never on the peace in between, and so people assume the violence there is constant.  The newspapers in 2009 and 2010 were full of articles detailing the increase in violence south of the border, yet few have been written since 2011; people assume the violence is still increasing, yet the truth is that it has seen steady decline since 2011, with recent rates back down around where they were seven years ago.

It bears mentioning at this point that the drug war in Mexico has never put American tourists at any special risk compared to the population at large.  The drug trade is a multi-billion dollar industry, and Joe Tourist is quite insignificant in comparison.  The vast majority of casualties in the drug war, in fact, have been either criminals or those fighting against them.  It has been the unwavering message of the US Department of State that "there is no evidence that transnational criminal organizations have targeted US visitors and residents based on their nationality."  Picking up the analogy of living in southern Illinois, consider that I occasionally ran a cleaning supply delivery route that included customers in East Saint Louis.  Despite an average of one homicide every twelve days there at the time, we drivers never considered ourselves at any considerable risk while making deliveries.  Most crimes, after all, are not committed against random victims (or delivery drivers), but rather against someone close to the criminal.  It's the same when it comes to the Mexican drug cartels:  they don't know who we are, they don't know when or where we're going, and they honestly don't care one bit.

Detailed data and scholarly research has been harder to come by since 2011, which is to be expected since crime is on the downward trend.  Cartels have branched out since the drug war began, both in activity and in geography.  To a large extent, they have shifted operations to places with less opposition; Central American nations have thus seen a tremendous increase in violence over the last several years.  The PRI is back in office.  The state of Coahuila saw a 24% decrease in murder last year.  National violent crime rates are already in the same range as in the 1990s.  You and I will of course continue to hear rumors, stories, and concerns, and those will continue to give us reason to keep our ear to the ground.  But, just as I have in years past, allow me to state in the clearest of terms:  we are at no more risk traveling in Mexico as we are traveling here in these United States of America.  By far, the biggest risks to our well-being are tetanus, food poisoning, sprained ankles, and heat exhaustion.  There is no need for worry, no cause for concern, no reality to match the hype.  In fact, Parras is a safer place to hang your hat than Wichita.