Mourning the End of Paper Maps
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had.
I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books.
The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books, well I guess I won't read on my subway ride home. If my map does that in northern Scandinavia, well now I am fucked.
Just print 5 maps and laminate them and you're pretty safe against weather and time. Not so much with a digital map.
Print something and it will show that print as long as it is not physically destructed. Not so much with a digital map ("oh, our services don't work in this country ha ha. Did you not read the t&c?")
Sun glare. Off the grid for three weeks. Weight. None of this is a problem with analog maps.
I guess you can solve most of these problems by throwing lots of money at god knows what military/navy device, thus I specified non-rich people. Or you know, just use a paper map.
Driving directions: turn left at C509 (unmarked) for 2.9 miles. The exchange is past the creek. There will be big puddles, plow through them.
Problems happen when you're in a Honda civic that can't go through 2.5 feet of water. So you have to turn around and find your own way to the exchange, with no cell service.
We always bring multiple copies of a Michigan Atlas. This way we can pinpoint where we are (using GPS) and find nearby roads, despite the terrible race directions.
Getting caught with a GPS-capable device on the land nav course was considered cheating.
- Backpacking for one night: Probably just phone (I use an app called Offline Topo Maps, works great).
- Backpacking for an extended amount of time: Paper
- Backpacking in winter/snow: Paper and Phone. (Only use the phone for when I'm not quite sure where I am)
- Motorcycle tour: Phone.
- Multiday rafting: Paper.
- Bicycle Tour: Phone and Paper.
- General Travel to a new place: Phone.
I feel as if one isn't necessarily better than the other, they both have their pros & cons for different activities.
Get out of cell phone service, which isn't uncommon in rural America...or lose the charge on your phone...and wind up on a winding country road...and see how well you can get yourself to civilization.
Two is one and one is none. With the way we depend on technology, it seems that society is always one power outage away from chaos.
I'm like you, too. I have an awesome Harley-Davidson map book that has complete maps of almost all highways in the entire USA, state by state. Also has maps of large metro areas in it, too.
Additionally, I always buy one of those NatGeo maps for wherever I'm going hiking/backpacking/camping (typically nat'l parks/monuments, but also Nat'l forests, state parks, etc.)
With these, I'm always prepared for no cell service.
I do not recall ever having drained my cell battery completely. And I have a car charger.
There are reasons to keep paper maps around, but lack of signal and running out of battery aren't on the list.
USGS publishes nicely formatted quadrangle-sized PDFs when smaller areas are enough, and CalTopo provides custom PDF generation when it’s more useful to specify a range. These I print at home on a 24” Epson 7800 and some paper I really like for the purpose (iGage Weatherproof Paper).
One of my favourite things to do while out hiking is to sit with a compass and a map and try to identify peaks and glaciers. I could do it for hours.
ETA: Everything I've heard about CalTopo makes it sound like God's gift to us.
More than once I've had to give people my backup paper map copy because they had no idea where they were, usually as their phone has run out of charge!
That said, I remember saving up a bit of money as a kid to get 2 or 3 USGS topo maps. Now, I can get pretty good topo maps of the entire world for free from my browser. That's a beautiful thing.
Digital maps:
* rely on precious battery charge and weight
* aren't very robust
* are extremely hard to use in the dark or with night vision
* can't be cut and folded into something small and light enough to hold in a hand
* when portable aren't large enough for displaying on a table or wall for people to gather around
But maps of all sorts are a dying breed, the bulk of the uses for maps were to find directions and turn-by-turn voice navigation has made the map component pretty much optional.
As for night vision, you mean when wearing vision enhancement optics? I did not fully understand you the first time, I thought you meant night vision as in 'night adapted eyes', where you'd lower the intensity as much as possible not to ruin your night vision. Not sure what the implications would be for electronically enhanced optics but if they use a display you could of course put the map straight on the display?
And how are you going to take a compass bearing off an image being beamed straight into your eyes?
And the problem with a digital map with a backlight is it lights you up like a beacon!
There was a cartoon on that subject where they re-invented paper as an improvement on the laptop. 'Can be read in full sunlight', 'lasts for 100's of years on a single charge', 'can be burned safely in a pinch' and so on.
You can open a paper map up and look at a hundred km squares at once at a resolution no display can match.
Why do you need to shine light on a backlight? You can read it directly at night.
>And you'd need a specially adapted display that used an IR backlight to use with night vision - I haven't seen something like that in practice. My smart watch has a night vision mode, but that's an LCD.
Who, aside the army uses night vision?
You can't use a backlight at night - you'd light yourself up like a beacon, and destroy your night vision adaptation.
Otherwise, I wouldn't go trekking/hiking at night either. Who does, so that that "map reading at night while maintaining night vision adaptation" to be a real non-outlier concern?
If the use case is reading a map at a campsite, e.g. to prepare for tomorrow's hike, then the "night vision adaptation" should not be that important, and a backlit map device would do just fine. And you can have the screen at low brightness and not mess (or not mess much) with your night vision adaptation.
Where do you napkin-estimate the percentage of people in the venn diagram AND of "uses maps", "need to read them at night", "need to maintain night vision adaptation while doing so", "has some night vision contraption to be able to read things they shine light on"?
Anyone doing alpine climbing will at some point start in the dark and/or return in the dark.
And imo it's easier to unfold a full sized map which immediately displays a wide area, to get your bearings, as opposed to having to zoom/pan on a digital map.
Minor inconveniences but arguably a smoother experience. Of course when I sat digital map I'm pretty much referring to Google maps on a phone.
The range of activities where the arguments you made hold versus those in which they are not of concern is becoming ever narrower - I'd struggle to think of much beyond recreation/extreme environments/military examples, and these are very much a minority compared to the rest of the digital mapping world.
Don't get me wrong, I love paper maps too and have seen some pretty amazing examples - in the atrium of one facility I visited they had a two-storey high printed OS style map that was quite something - but the world has moved on. Perhaps e-ink displays will marry the two back together at some point.
* weight a lot more than digital
* aren't robust to water, dirty, or even manipulation
* require extra equipment to read on the dark
* can be cut and folded, but lose usefulness on the process (I really don't get your claim that cell phones can't be hold in a hand)
But that last point is spot on. Ditto for the people talking about writing on the map (digital could improve on this front).
Anyway navigating a paper map requires some careful folding and unfolding that is quite slow, and you must carefully select what maps you'll bring every time, while for digital maps you just bring the entire continent.
I don't see how one can declare any of them a clear win. The answer depends too much on your use case.
You just laminate them.
I know, I know, IP ratings. Okay... good luck.
Totally agree that neither digital nor paper maps is a clear winner. Each use case has different requirements and sometimes digital is better and sometimes paper is.
You do not need extra equipment to read in the dark, you just need to not be standing next to a street lamp. Your eyes adjust quite well. If the moon is out you can read a map with sunglasses on. The moon is plenty bright enough to cast shadows and read by if there are no external light sources nearby.
If you use paper maps for any period of time, folding them becomes second nature, this is like saying that reading books takes too long compared to watching movies because you have to learn to read. On boats, navigational maps are rolled and there is dedicated space for unrolling them. Not all maps are used in the backcountry. Also maps come in bound formats called atlases which are quite convenient. Also Mapscos.
I feel like this post was written by someone who grew up in a post google maps world.
I didn't argue that they weren't waterproof. I laminate all my maps. I know they can be waterproof.
> You do not need extra equipment to read in the dark
Fundamentally, you're going to need a torch or image intensification on occasion. There can be not enough moonlight to read a map to any extent.
> If you use paper maps for any period of time, folding them becomes second nature
Yes that's what I argued was a benefit of them - that they can be folded easily.
> On boats, navigational maps are rolled and there is dedicated space for unrolling them
Yes that's what I argued was a benefit of them - that they can be displayed on a table.
> Not all maps are used in the backcountry.
Yes, I argued an advantage is being able to put them on the wall.
> I feel like this post was written by someone who grew up in a post google maps world.
I've spent hundreds of days operating by map alone all around the world. So, no.
I feel like you read my comment and somehow got the opposite understanding of every aspect. I was arguing that paper is better, and you've come in said no actually paper is better?
After 20 minutes, I began to realize my wife was casually leafing through dozens of poster-size maps with £30,000 price stickers on them. My jaw nearly dropped. Her hands held "art" that they valued at close to £500,000++. I also realized I couldn't afford the map I wanted and left empty-handed
While they don't sell originals, they do reproductions on demand for a lot less than 500k. I was just looking at a 1934 sheet for my wall, £27. Tho mainly I go to their site to jump back and forth in time, they have a great georeferenced map browser that lets you see how places have changed.
With digital maps, I can navigate from place to place to place pretty easily. But then I retain virtually no information. I end up with no 'nose' for how to find my own way home.
But if I study a map on paper, laboriously plan my route in advance, and then follow it IRL — it's like magic. That route is installed there forever.
Do that enough times, and navigating even really crazy big cities starts to become instinctual. No GPS required.
At this point, I tend to use my iPhone at the helm as well. The charts are updated more often, and the location and tracking are very accurate (with an external Bluetooth GPS).
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/07/18/2017-15...
https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Portals/9/DCO%20Documents/5p/5ps/NV...
But I sure hope you still keep your sextant and charts dry and safe below deck somewhere if you spend any time at sea.
It's an amazing non-proprietary technology, paper. Even things that are water damaged over the centuries, or obscured by foxing (a kind of staining), many times can be reversed and brought back to a clean state(we've worked some near miracles ourselves on some 18th century maps just recently). Without vulnerability to bit-flip, or cosmic rays compromising the data and rendering a work useless and corrupt, paper is lo-tech and easily enduring.
The paper map also enables a comprehensive view of the subject at many different scales, without having to move a cursor, pinch or expand... none of that, your eyes just take in and adjust. The benefit is an understanding of context and relationship. When we do presentations at schools it always interests us that there is a fragmented understanding of how things relate for some students, which almost feels like an artifact of digital cartography. In a digital world the constant zooming in an out, first to find the greater region, and then to reach down into the detail of a street or land feature. The problem is at that tight detailed scale, it's hard to see how it relates to much of its surroundings. You can push around at that detailed level and form some understanding, but it feels abstract, especially for those that don't have the best visual memory. The paper map affords a certain level of pattern recognition at different scales of detail without constant enlarging and reorienting.
We have maps going as far back as the late 15th century with the matrix of the paper being made of nothing more than cotton fiber, not gold or titanium, just simple cotton. When we read of the challenge of preserving the digital world and the technological progress of our species, it does concern us that even the best storage technologies available might reach 100 years or so.
Timothy O'Reilly in a talk a few years ago mentioned the danger of how technology can be lost. He mentioned how the great church, Hagia Sophia was the largest building on earth for about 1000 years, but then there was a long pause before anything came close to its stature again, almost as if the technical understanding of how to build at that scale was lost. In an era where almost everything is developed, distributed and saved in a digital format, perhaps we should print more hard copies, not just for backup purposes, but maybe for the unique perspective that that simple 2 dimensional surface can supply.
Sometimes i think, this was the plan behind the piracy support by some companys for some time. Disrupt the media companys and then take over.
Supply what others depend on for free - and wait until the industry collapses, then rule the wastelands.