Jeremy Parker
New Member
Like others I would suggest a paper mapsuzi said:
Using maps is like fixing punctures. It's easiest to start using them in a warm dry living room, rather than in the cold, rain and dark, by the side of the road.
Get one that shows your home, and see if there is anything interesting in the neighbourhood that you didn't know about. See whether the map is wrong anywhere. It takes time for new stuff to get onto a map, and occasionally there are mistakes, although British maps are usally pretty good. Sometimes the mistakes are deliberate. Map makers put in such mistakes, so they can see whether anyone is plagiarizing their map. Hopefully they do it where it won't be noticed, and won't matter to anyone using the map.
See what the map people consider important, and what they don't bother to show. Road maps for motorists, for example, quite often leave out railways, but railways can be useful for cyclists, because they make good landmarks, and you might even want to take your bike on a train. Maps have to leave out lots of things, just for the sake of being able to read the map, but some people get very bent out of shape by this, and go on about it being due to to the imperialistic designs of the ruling classes, suppressing the culture of the indigenous people, and so forth.
If you are just starting with maps, it might be wise to assume that you will sacrifice your first map, and will mess it up by drawing routes all over it with felt marker, making notes on it, or even cutting it up with scissors, if it's big eough to be a nuisance in one piece. You can always buy a second copy later, if your first one gets too messed up.
For the countryside the Ordnance Survey Landranger maps are nowadays pretty much the standard map for cyclists to use. In towns they have the disadvantage that they don't show street names, which makes them less useful than other maps for getting yourself un-lost if you take a wrong turn.
There's another series of maps, Bartholemew's ("Bart's") maps, that used to be regarded as the ideal maps for cyclists. What made them so good was the way they showed height, low places in green, higher in different kinds of brown, and so on. This made looking at them almost like looking at a 3D model of the earth, which is handy for cycling round the hills rather than over them, and also handy for keeping a general idea of where you are as you look at your surroundings. You can still get Bart's maps in second hand bookshops, probably more cheaply than a new map. They won't show the new stuff of course, but new roads are almost guaranteed to be the kind of road that are horrible (or even illegal) for riding a bike
I hope this helps
Jeremy Parker
