The Demise of Paper Maps!

‘Tis the season for travel. Gas prices are dropping, the warm weather is here, people are hitting the road! Today is July 4th – let the travel begin! I was reading an article today on The Northwester.com. It was commenting that the sale of road maps have been in decline since 2003. Remember those? You needed a large table to read the opened version, and then cringed at the thoughts of re-folding it!

I started reminiscing about the days I would call AAA to order a TripTik®. For those too young to remember, AAA would create a handy flip chart made up of map segments that had your travel route highlighted. They would even mark out known construction, tolls and restrictions – like no oxygen tanks or heavy vehicles!

I visited the AAA.com site and lo and behold, they still offer TripTiks ®! This newer version provides an online map with your route highlighted and the directions on the left. You can also change the route by dragging the highlighted line. Sound familiar? You can also do this with Google Maps, Mapquest, Bing Maps, Rand McNally and others!

Of course there is also the handy dandy GPS, which we all have our GPS horror stories – like the young man traveling down my street at a high rate of speed convinced that this south version of the street was connected to the north version – but alas his GPS was wrong – the two were not connected! The laws of physics still work, and it never ends well when an object in motion collides with a stationary object, like a telephone pole. Fortunately no one was hurt.

This holiday week – please drive safely, obey the speed limits, and maybe double check that GPS route with a map!