My loving family just bought me a GPS for my car this past Christmas. It is great. If I want to drive to Elmo’s Shelter for Battered and Abused Tropical Domestic Fish in Dallas….I just type in the name, the GPS locates it, maps out a route, and then in a sexy female voice with a British accent, it directs me turn by turn to Elmo’s. It computes my exact arrival time, how many miles are remaining, tells me when I am speeding, and will even wash, wax, and detail the car whenever we are out of the car for more than an hour or so. What a great little contraption!
But we did not have these little Gizmo’s back in the 1970′s and 1980′s when I was younger…..
We had the trusty ROAD ATLAS!
For those of you that had these ancient documents, I am sure you remember them well as I do…..
Some facts about your typical ROAD ATLAS of that era:
They HAD to be about 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, thereby resulting in only two places that you could stash them when not in use…. on the ledge under your back window just behind your rear seat, or stuffed under the front seats where they would undoubtedly get drenched by multiple drink spills, and they would get mashed by the feet of your overly tall backseat passengers.
The ROAD ATLAS contained maps of every US State, and every State and Province in Canada and Mexico.
The ROAD ATLAS usually had a map of the US on the inside cover in which you could attempt to compute your travel time as you drove across country. The map would have a couple cities in each state listed and each city would be interconnected via a series of lines that would list the mileage and estimated travel time between each interconnected city. If you had to get from San Diego to Boston, you followed all the interconnected cities across the map, writing down the travel times between each point, and then 36 cities later, you got out your calculator or grabbed your math-whiz kid, and you added up all the times to find out how long the drive would take you. Now, as a rule of thumb, the ROAD ATLAS folks would take a number of factors into account when computing the travel times. They would factor in speed limits, average amounts of congestion in the cities, they apparently computed each driver to be about 93 years old, would allow for stoppages due to trains blocking the road, would allow time for following slow-moving farm apparatus on the highway, would allow time for meal and restroom breaks, time spent by motorcycle cops writing out your speeding tickets, etc. The ROAD ATLAS folks would then take the combined times, divide them by three, then subtract 412, then times the new sum by the square root of 37, would throw out each 4th numeral, and then, once an elapsed time was finally achieved, they would arbitrarily add 4.7 hours to the elapsed time. Thus, using the ROAD ATLAS method of elapsed travel time, the trip from San Diego to Boston, in 1978, should have taken someone about 23 Days, 17 hours, and 12 minutes to complete.
The typical ROAD ATLAS of the day was responsible for many of the earliest recorded ROAD RAGE incidents as solo drivers wrestled with their bulky ROAD ATLAS maps as they drove. The ATLAS would usually be splayed out across the steering wheel, blocking most of the driver’s vision, causing the car to swerve violently, usually causing the car to slow down, wander off the shoulder repeatedly, clip a few pedestrians standing too close to the curb, etc. Sometimes people in the rear seat would have ATLAS spread out and this would cause the driver to only look in his/her rear-view mirror as they constantly yelled at the ATLAS reader trying to obtain timely directions. This usually enraged the drivers that were following behind in that they actually had a clue where they were and knew exactly how to get to where THEY were going.
The ROAD ATLAS had maps of every state with MOST roads listed for that state. Freeways were in large enough graphics that you could easily read them. State highways were smaller and usually required a small amount of eye strain to be able to read correctly. County roads were tiny and usually required the use of school age kids in the car to read for their eyesight challenged parents. Local roads were impossible to read without aid of a high-powered electron microscope. Each state was also allowed to post small maps of a couple “major cities” with these maps usually containing additional maps of the downtown areas of those cities. If you were going to one of the 99% of the OTHER cities in that state and needed a detailed map….you were screwed.
ROAD ATLAS’s had another important rule. In order to be used correctly, you actually had to have a clue where you were at that exact moment in order to know how to get anywhere. The deserts and back roads of this Country are littered with the rusted-out hulks of thousands of cars who’s drivers became hopelessly lost decades ago….and having no clue as to where they were….they pulled out their trusty ROAD ATLAS only to discover that since they were hopelessly lost and had no clue where they were on the map….and since they had forgotten their electron microscope at home….they too…..were screwed.
ROAD ATLAS rules required that you purchase a new copy each year even though the maps were the same, the roads were the same, and there was basically nothing new in the whole book except for a new picture of some US landmark on the cover. I remember many a time when I was a kid when my Dad, hopelessly lost and not willing to admit it, would yell for me to hand him the Atlas from the back window ledge of our family car. I would hand him the ATLAS and then he would sometimes go into a loud rage yelling “This is last years!! Get me the new one!!”
I still have a ROAD ATLAS in my car. It is wadded up in a crumpled heap under my passenger seat, with a half-melted Hershey’s chocolate bar stuck to it…..waiting for it’s next use when and if the new GPS ever breaks down…..
