Are Paper Maps a Thing of the Past ?

There was an interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle last Friday by Michael Cabanatuan entitled Paper maps crumpling in face of electronic onslaught (Paper Maps) which contains some interesting statistics.  AAA hands out a lot of maps and the number handed out in Northern California and Nevada has dropped over the past three years

2004 8.4 million
2005 8.2 million
2006 7.8 million.

That's only about a 7% drop.  So many people rely on GPSs in their vehicles and Google Maps, MapQuest, or other on-line services for navigation that I wonder what people are doing with all these paper maps - maybe using them for wallpaper ?

Comments

[Jason Birch]

Paper maps haven't gone anywhere. I went on a two-week road trip with my family this summer, and found that:

- GPS is still next to useless for anything but getting you from A to B, or maybe finding a coffee shop that closed last year.

- Web-maps are better, but in many areas are only useful from the motel/hotel room at night (if you're lucky). TripAdvisor and other tools are similarly useful but connection-constrained.

For real-time route planning and navigation, paper maps are still a critical part of any road trip. Apart from the trusty road atlas, I know that the first thing that I did in new areas was try to find the local "attractions map", showing popular places. They generally had great landmarks on them, and made it easy for locals to show me where the real attractions were :)

[Tim Case]

The Myth of the Paperless Office is a great book to read...and its insights on one the most amazing technologies (printed paper) are excellent and apply to road maps as much as office documents. GPS-based map navigation is an "and" innovation not "or".