Originally published at: Aging Angeleño angst: Thomas Guide map book returns | Boing Boing
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Since when did an “ñ” appear in Angeleno?
I was from Orange County and kept by Thomas Guide in the back seat. The punk shows we went to were often in strange places and it was invaluable. What good would it do in the freakin’ trunk?
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It was always in the trunk and always required stopping someplace shitty to find it, and then the page you needed was for some reason torn out.
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Looked up [from the computer screen] at the book shelf, and there it is the 1992 Thomas Guide for San Diego County.
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There’s a local company in Phoenix that does the same thing for maps of that city and Tucson; they had a brick n mortar store which also sold pretty much all things cartography related. I have no idea if they are still around, though- I’ve not needed to use one of their city maps for something like 15 years.
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In a world where you now receive spoken directions …
Sometimes those spoken directions are wildly wrong. When given my street address, some GPS machines and apps try to get as close as possible to the actual house, which is on a riverbank a thousand feet down a driveway. Delivery trucks have been directed to the opposite side of the river and then told the destination is 300 feet away.
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I’m not sure what works best for emergency vehicles, but for my own getting around I prefer to look at a map before I leave and figure out a route. I would rather know where I’m going and how to get there than blindly follow GPS directions.
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Back seat pockets in my family’s cars as well. Rarely pulled out, except in my step-father’s car (grudgingly, accompanied by cursing acknowledgment that we were lost).
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I used mine pretty heavily in Maine and Wisconsin when I lived in those places, as well as Northern California. When I worked in the Bay Area during the dot com era, it was always within arm’s reach.
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In a world where you now receive spoken directions into your wireless earbuds, or via your Smart Watch, or your Smart Phone, or your Smart Car, or your e-bike, and maybe on those annoying scooters it seems off that we’re still printing big unwieldy books of maps to keep in the trunk of our car.
Physical maps are still invaluable in some situations, though…like when you’re on a bicycle tour across the USA via I-10 and can’t pull up any digital info on your phone because T-Mobile still sucks in many areas along the southern border…
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I love the Thomas Guides. I am a firm believer that being able to read a map, calculate a tip mentally, and memorize a short passage are foundational skills. If you can’t do those, I don’t see how you can do more complicated mental or cognitive functions. I really think that the smartphone is making us less able to work our way through a three-step thought.
The GPS is very valuable for taking traffic into account; that’s something a map can’t do.
I’m a firm believer in lots and lots of so-called “rote” memorization in school. The roter the better. Along with other cognitive tasks like mental arithmetic in the earliest grades.
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I’m ready to buy one. I’m also pretty sure I would never use it.
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I admit it: I’m old and I have an analogue brain. I used the “Tommy Brothers” maps constantly during my freelance days and continued for a long time even after the advent of dashboard GPS units. I still find physical maps easier to use and more…I don’t know, supportive…than robovoice apps. I do use apps. It’s just that using them I feel like I’m blindfolded and being led buy someone saying, “:trust me.”
Among the things I like about physical maps is that I can see the big picture at the same time as I see the fine details. I can see all the street names, not just the ones the app thinks I need to see. And when my phone’s dead and my laptop is at home I can pull the thing out and get full functionality just by opening the book. By the way, I carried mine under the passenger seat (usually unoccupied) where I could easily reach down and grab it. And I did NOT try reading it while driving.
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I had all of Southern California in my territory in the 90’s so I had a Thomas Guide for every county south of Santa Barbara in my car. I knew a quarter of the state by page and grid coordinate. Where is that? 64 B-2.
I’d get new ones every year and friends and family appreciated the year-old guides I’d give away. By the 2000’s I was denying requests to buy them for staff at a different company since we were less mobile and could just look online where we needed to go before we left.
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LOL! Thank you for the flashbacks. Can confirm on both fronts. In Southern California, Thomas Guides were read more often and by more people than the bible. But they also did have us discovering things we might never have known about the region.
Including highways, L.A. County has 22,000 miles of streets. If you had your own car and didn’t have a Thomas Guide, you were most assuredly fucked at any moment.
Fun fact: To protect against infringement, each page of the Thomas Guide contains one street that does not exist.
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We still have our LA/Orange County Thomas Guide on our book shelf.
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I really don’t miss the pain in the but that was trying to find a numeric address by looking up streets in an index and then trying to find the street in a grid, then manually trying to figure a route across multiple pages.
I do miss getting a larger context of where I am - but I can also do that by zooming out on Google maps. So, even though I have fond memories of trips to AAA to get all the regional and local maps I need, I also remember frequently not having the local map for the city I didn’t expect to have to travel to, and then trying to find one at a gas station, which sold inferior, badly drawn maps. My nostalgia for paper maps is limited.
I loved the Thomas Bros. maps and had LA and Orange county editions in the seat pocket all the time. Great for not only finding your destination, but discovering things different neighborhoods. Also absolutely vital for skill/gimmick car ralleys. The were so ubiquitous that I remember a couple businesses that would just give the page number of grid square when you called and asked where they were located.
I love my GPS, but I tend to keep cars longer than the makers provide update discs for the map data, and sometimes you have to drive a rental car. Exactly twice have I tried to use a smart phone for turn by turn directions, and both times it was absolutely terrible. My favorite was on Maui, when the phone guided not to our resort hotel but to a small cemetery and announced, “You have reached your final destination.” Profound.
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I’m sorry, at a loss here, what was confusing? Was it …the index? Remembering the page and grid, or something else?
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