Sort of related, friends and I were talking today and the subject of AAA (American Automobile Association) came up.
I recalled I had joined back in 1990, in preparation for my spontaneous trip to Canada. I had just left my job and had two weeks before my new one. Some how I got it in my head to drive from So Cal up the coast to Canada, across to Calgary, bounce off of Yellowstone and home via Utah.
I joined AAA and got not just a bunch of maps and guides that they’re famous for, but I also got a “TripTic”.
The TripTic was this custom route plan in a spiral bound book. The book is, roughly, 7-8 inches long and 3ish inches wide. And the way it works was you opened it up, starting on the first page, and followed it by going “up”. The driving direction was always up, but not necessarily north. Up was forward. Each page was a chunk of interstate highway and the surrounding area mapped out.
If you took a larger map and placed rectangles end to end along your route, and orienting each map section appropriately, then bound them all in a flip book, that was a TripTic.
My book was probably 20 pages long. My route was 4500 miles. I imagine they made mini maps for all of the major highways and interstates, going in both directions, for the US and Canada. Honestly you could probably do it with as few as 100 map segments, if that many. They had a lot of cubbies in the cabinet, not sure if there were 100 of them.
I only used it once, but it was a great to navigation for my trip, and thought it was a really clever system.
When I was growing up in the 90s, Triptics were a staple of every family summer vacation. My parents used CAA (Canadian version of the AAA) and before every trip they would also get large format maps with the entire route methodically highlighted, even with warnings for construction or slow points.
The fun though was still following the directions. Nowadays the GPS tells you exactly which exits to take or which lanes to stay in. It wasn't a family vacation without crazy stress as a bunch of offramps or potential exits approached, or the eventual looping back for a missed exit. GPS makes it all easier. But it also feels like going on autopilot without a hint of adventure in the way that roadtrips used to feel.
It must have been the late 80s when my parents briefly had a AAA membership, and I remember going with my dad to pick up a Triptic for a vacation.
I'd never imagined something like that, so I thought it was a very excellent thing at the time as the clerk skillfully explained how to use it. My dad was more reluctant to deal with this kind of help.
We only ever used it once, since my dad felt that he was sufficiently expert at reading maps that he didn't need Triptics.
Unfortunately, he expected everyone else around him to be as expert with maps as he was, and he was the one who was doing the driving.
Usually, this combined to mean that family vacations were syncopated with the car being angrily slung onto the shoulder of the freeway in the space between an exit ramp and the driving lanes, where words were exchanged between the driver and the navigator.
And if handled right, good GPS nav almost completely resolves that situation.
But you're right: It does lead to bland road trips. I find the routes to be pretty unmemorable and fatiguing at times. This is a bummer because travelling can take up so much time in a vacation -- it'd be nice if there were something more memorable than an endless ribbon of uninterrupted pavement.
(And one solution for that is the "Avoid Highways" function in the navigation software. When the boredom and fatigue begin to set in, use this button to just get the hell off of the freeway and see what the area is about.
It takes time, but I think it is worth making time to do this occasionally.)
One reason I'm not eager to ever have an EV - you can't really do the "avoid highways" thing on a non-trivial EV roadtrip, so you're doomed to Interstates...
Just to posit some numbers: If there's 80 miles of range left, and it is 20 miles to the next charger, but mashing the "avoid highways" button makes that next charger 40 miles away instead: I think I wouldn't hesitate to get off of the highway if I felt it would be useful or fun right now.
I'll hypothetically arrive at a charger with ~40 miles of range remaining instead of ~60. Ain't so bad. I do similar risk assessments when driving long distances on gasoline and detouring from my planned route to mix things up.
Now, of course: There's a decent chance that the charger is broken or slow and being SOL, whereas gas is much more available. That's potentially pretty ugly, and it's ugly in ways that running low/out of gas isn't:
It's easy to score some gas in semi-rural anywhere-USA by knocking on a few doors, being polite, and having a bit of cash. (Some people are complete dicks, but I insist that most people are generally good and I am willing to die on this hill.)
Or: I have cheap roadside assistance. They'll bring me a small amount of gas anywhere...eventually...as a part of the service that I pay for by the month.
It's probably also easy enough to ask nicely to use an extension cord to juice up an EV, but that's a ton slower than dumping in a couple of gallons of gasoline is.
And due to limited range, it's more likely to happen with an EV than ICE.
But meh. It's still useful to go on a mini-adventure sometimes. One just needs to take everything into consideration.
And it'll get easier for EV drivers to do this as time moves on.
There's a 90' style website for longer bike trips between (mostly) German cities: https://radweit.de/. Each trip is often one A4 page and cuts up the complete track into individual map segments neatly arranged so it fills a single page. We used that once a while ago and it worked great.
And kind of like software, in that there was a big investment up front (by AAA) to develop the system and all the pages, but then they could crank out specific itineraries cheaply and on demand.
This rolled map and notes system is still used today in many rally events, especially on motorcycles in events like the Dakar Rally. (Many cars and trucks use digital screens instead, but the paper has real advantages for the moto guys...
Can anyone think of a good algorithm for “unrolling” or nearly “straightening” a wiggly route line so that it could fit in one long narrow straight strip?
It still needs to retain illustrative turns and kinks to help with wayfinding.
Maybe if we cheat with the straight segments to make up for the error?
The idea is that visually a straight road or a road bending with a very large radius are almost impossible to distinguish. Whereas visually a 90 degree left turn is very different from a 10 degree left turn.
For example if you have a simple route plan with 10 mile straight followed by a 90 degree left turn and 10 mile straight again. You could instead draw a 10 mile long circle segment which turns the straight bit slightly to the right side of your strip, then draw an 80 deg turn to the left followed by an other circle segment which bends the route back towards straight.
If you are happy with that solution visually then the algorithm which can generate it for you could be an optimisation with two terms, one which penalises deviations in curvature (penalising more heavily where the original curvature was tight), and an other which penalises the route wiggling too far in either direction away from the centre of the paper strip.
Still not sure how one could handle cases where the route turns 180 or close to it though.
I don't think it's upside down, but looks like on the "wrong" arm, though that's debatable depending on handedness.
The more I think about this though, this seems like only one of several fundamental issues with this thing :P
It’s funny. I am left handed but I have always worn a watch on my left arm. At some point, when I was told that was “wrong”, I tried putting it on my right wrist but I couldn’t deal with it.
I also mouse right handed because in the early days there was no such thing as an ergonomic mouse and it often wasn’t easy to change the settings to reverse the buttons. It does mean I can mouse and write at the same time.
I recalled I had joined back in 1990, in preparation for my spontaneous trip to Canada. I had just left my job and had two weeks before my new one. Some how I got it in my head to drive from So Cal up the coast to Canada, across to Calgary, bounce off of Yellowstone and home via Utah.
I joined AAA and got not just a bunch of maps and guides that they’re famous for, but I also got a “TripTic”.
The TripTic was this custom route plan in a spiral bound book. The book is, roughly, 7-8 inches long and 3ish inches wide. And the way it works was you opened it up, starting on the first page, and followed it by going “up”. The driving direction was always up, but not necessarily north. Up was forward. Each page was a chunk of interstate highway and the surrounding area mapped out.
If you took a larger map and placed rectangles end to end along your route, and orienting each map section appropriately, then bound them all in a flip book, that was a TripTic.
My book was probably 20 pages long. My route was 4500 miles. I imagine they made mini maps for all of the major highways and interstates, going in both directions, for the US and Canada. Honestly you could probably do it with as few as 100 map segments, if that many. They had a lot of cubbies in the cabinet, not sure if there were 100 of them.
I only used it once, but it was a great to navigation for my trip, and thought it was a really clever system.