“Do they even make paper maps anymore?” Jacquie Phelan asks over on the Charlie Cunningham Medical and Rehab site (look for the March 9th, 2024 entry as they don’t do permalinks over there.) It’s a valid question. Many analog things have faded away over the past couple of decades. And with many of these “fading away” things, there wasn’t a hard and fast line where one day we were using paper maps, then digital. But that’s how these slow paradigm shifts get you, you don’t notice until you notice.
Now I know that paper maps aren’t completely “dead”, but they have gotten harder to find. One area that has been acutely affected is the world of bike maps. When I became “A Commuter Cyclist” in 2001, one of the first things one would find is a local bike map, hopefully free. And this map would live in your pocket or your bag, pulled out for consultation when you wanted to figure out the best route between A and B. Heck, many of us carried extra, to be handed to out-of-towners or the cyclist who showed up on your ride and has absolutely no clue how to get home. But yes, smartphones and Google Maps have taken over that role for most. And because of that, print bicycle maps have become harder to find.
The category of bike map that was hit the hardest was the ones you had to pay for. Metro, our regional government, printed up a beautiful all-encompassing map on waterproof paper. This was the go-to map for me. But in 2018, citing low sales, Metro discontinued the Bike There! map. And by that point, this cessation got little sympathy–there are only 10 comments on that Bikeportland article and only one of them is a true lament about the map’s end. I still have a few copies of the last map, one is currently in my bag. Even though it’s a bit out of date, having a nice big map that you can see a big overview of an area is sometimes better than squinting at a computer screen, or worse, a phone.
I’ve been organizing the mess that’s in the workroom in the garage, and one of the things I’m tackling is my map collection. I’ve loved collecting maps, and pretty much everything I’ve gotten over the last quarter-century I’ve saved. I’ve started to purge some of them, as there’s no need for me to save an MBTA transit map from 2003 anymore. But it’s been a nostalgia trip since most of these maps were from my travels. So they remind me of certain places, certain trips, certain people, certain eras of my life.
The biggest trigger is all the maps that I used on the Cross-Continent Tour in 2011. While I had an iPod Touch and April a netbook, both of us were at least a year away from smartphones. That was an era where cell service wasn’t as prevalent as it is today, especially in some of the sparsely populated and/or rugged regions we traveled through. Unless you had a dedicated GPS unit, paper maps were a must. We picked up a lot of maps as we went, planning out our route on the way.
Along with the slow fade of paper bike maps comes the disappearance of the map holder. There was a time not too long ago when most bike shops would have some for sale, usually the type you can strap or Velcro to your handlebars. I haven’t seen one in a store for quite some time, and it appears that the stalwart Cyco-Active holder is a thing of the past. Thankfully I still have a few holders. My now-mothballed North St. randonneur-style handlebar bag had a big map holder on the top flap. While this style of map holder still exists in most rando bags, it’s almost like a vestigial limb–most folks use it to hold patches or stickers. But my Bike There! map lived in that map pouch.
I still love my paper maps, and still use them, especially on a bike tour. There are still areas in this part of the world where cell service is absent, and even if you download a map onto a phone, what happens when the phone loses charge? And I’m glad that Adventure Cycling Association is still committed to making paper maps, as their maps are very useful, at least for their routes.1 I am in no way against digital maps. I use Google Maps a lot, and love the functionality of apps like RideWithGPS. And someday I may get a GPS unit for really remote touring–there are areas in this part of the world where roads are not named or marked. But I don’t want paper maps to die completely, even though I’m resigned to that eventuality.
- One anecdote about ACA maps: They are about $12 a pop for members. When we passed through Missoula, Adventure Cycling’s home base, we stayed with a friend who worked there, so I took generous advantage of her employee discount, getting as many maps as I thought I’d need for the tour and for a few years afterward! ↩︎
Urban Adventure League 
Most of the riding I do where I might want a map tends to be in undeveloped / back country areas, and I tend to always have a topo map with me on those occasions. While I do miss walking into an REI to finger through a bunch, the USGS’s GetMaps / topoView is invaluable since I can get any USGS map from the earliest to the most recent (unfortunately, the most recent ones, and the information they show, pale in comparison to the older ones) upload the file and print at full size. My collection has grown considerably as a result.
I miss ubiquitous paper maps SO MUCH. I still have one single Metro Bike There map from 2018 (ha, I also have the 2007 one) that I guard religiously. I too used to have extra that I gave away to folks who visited on bikes, but now I’m very stingy with my lone copy because I love it so much to get a big regional overview when I have a mind to adventure.
Also, I may be the only person who still travels with ripped-out atlas pages when I take longer bike trips (though I also may be the only person who doesn’t have a smart phone, ha).
True. But we won’t mention the “work” smartphone. 😉
Ha, I almost said “except for work” since I knew you would quibble with that, but then figured it wasn’t worth the typing;) But now here I am typing even more about it;) Work phone doesn’t come on long bike adventures of the atlas sort though.