The Map Room

I drove to Toronto and back over the weekend. I knew the way, but I used my Garmin nüvi 255W (see previous entry) to navigate. Of course, there were some quirks. I have the following observations about what it recommended:

1. It’s deeply schizophrenic about the express and collector lanes on Highway 401 in Toronto: it directed me to switch back and forth between them. I knew better and ignored it.
2. It will not hesitate to recommend back roads as shortcuts — even deeply twisty ones with single-lane bridges. There are times when sticking to main highways is better.
3. The navigation algorithm does not let you deviate from the highlighted route without it squawking about it. I decided to take an alternate route that I knew would add a only couple of minutes. It instructed me to turn around and get back to the original route long after the new route would be shorter; my ETA suddenly improved by 15 minutes once it accepted the new route.

This was using the quickest route option. There will, in other words, always be navigational quirks. It’s always a good idea to know enough about the route to know when to ignore your GPS’s advice — but then I’m not saying anything new here.

On the sidebar, you’ll notice a new Google Friend Connect box. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet, but if you use Google Friend Connect, you can use it here.

The Map Room’s Facebook page has been around for nearly two years; if you want this blog’s posts polluting your news feeds (beats farms and ninjas, don’t you think?), well, you can do that. When I produce a post you like, please do use the “like” button — the feedback helps me figure out what people like reading. (My personal Facebook profile is just that: personal — I have to know you.)

Elsewhere in Socialnetworkistan, you can follow me on Twitter, but I talk about everything there, not just maps. I do have a list of Twitter feeds about maps that I follow (now don’t get all excited trying to get me to add you to it; I’m not trying to be comprehensive). I do find a lot of good material by stealing from other people’s accounts on Twitter, and sending me new links that way, quite frankly, works.

My FriendFeed account accumulates all my stuff, so is of limited interest to the map aficionado. Google Buzz: still too early to tell, but my Google Profile is here.

All the attention OpenStreetMap has been receiving of late with respect to the Haitian earthquake prodded me to stop procrastinating, sign up for an account there, and poke around with it a bit. In what I think was a wise move, I stayed well away from the Haitian map tiles and fiddled around with the online editor in areas I knew well but were not mapped very thoroughly. (My home town is scarcely mapped at all. I will have to do something about that.)

So, if any OSM members have been wondering who the hell has been screwing up the maps in the Ottawa-Gatineau area (especially Hull and Aylmer), the Upper Ottawa Valley (especially the Quebec side) and a couple of spots in Winnipeg — um, that was me. Sorry. It was too much fun.

In addition to my acts of map data desecration, I’ve been doing some reading on how to create, edit and classify the data. I don’t have anything profound to say yet, but I might later on.

Update, 12:40 PM: I should clarify that when I say “my town is scarcely mapped at all,” I mean that it’s scarcely mapped in OpenStreetMap — it’s well covered by both Navteq and Tele Atlas and shows up in Google, Bing, MapQuest and Yahoo.

You might remember that for the longest time, I was in the weird position of writing a blog about maps and mapping technology without so much as owning a single GPS receiver. That state came to an end last December, when I got a Celestron SkyScout for Christmas, and picked up a Nikon GP-1 geotagger shortly after that. (I wrote about the SkyScout in my post about GPS for amateur astronomers, and reviewed the GP-1 back in March.) But while GPS is integral to each of these gadgets, neither would be recognized as “a GPS” in the colloquial sense — i.e., a personal navigation device (PND) with maps and directions.

I’ve resisted buying one of those for years, not just because, as someone who’s been reading highway, street and topo maps from a very young age — I used to read highway maps until I got sick, which in my case was about five minutes — I didn’t see the need. I was also reluctant to put myself in a position where I’d be arguing with the device, disagreeing with the directions it gave me. And all the stories I posted to this blog about people blindly following their PNDs off cliffs or into rivers did not exactly persuade me that I needed one.

Even so, a bit more than three weeks ago, I actually bought one. More specifically, I bought a Garmin nüvi 255W — a rather inexpensive device with a 4.3-inch screen, text-to-speech directions, and not much else in the way of bells and whistles. (GPS Tracklog reviewed the nüvi 255W last year — favourably.)

So why did I do that, after going so long without one? What changed?

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I can’t remember the first time I ever saw a map, but I’ve always been transfixed by them. As a child, I studied highway maps on long car trips until I got sick, which unfortunately was never long. When I went to summer camp, I mapped the entire property — tramping around each trail, giving them my own idiosyncratic names, and taking my best shot at the surrounding topography. At my grandparents’ cottage, I hammered paper road signs into trees and made imaginary highways through the poplar bush; the signs disintegrated immediately, and my grandfather was pulling nails out of the trees for the rest of the summer.

Official highway maps were my bread and butter: we were a family that vacationed by road, so we always had them. Canadian provinces have tourist offices at each border; I insisted that we stop to pick up the newest map, which at the time were always free. Or city maps from the CAA: I must have memorized the entire freeway network of Montreal by the time I was 13, which is impressive when you consider that I lived in Winnipeg.

Continue reading this entry.