ELK GROVE, Calif. — Never say never when it comes to Nevers Way.
It's nowhere to be found in the 2005 Thomas Guide for Sacramento County. Don't bother searching MapQuest.com or Yahoo Maps. And no matter how long you ogle Google, you'll still come up empty-handed.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's here -- really -- an L-shaped little strip of recently framed houses and construction dust in the second-fastest-growing city in America. Stretching from Canadeo Circle (don't waste your time looking) to Canadeo Way (ditto), Nevers eventually will make its way into the map books.
It just won't happen soon enough to help the next wave of residents to this growing Central Valley subdivision as they struggle to guide moving vans and furniture trucks, pizza deliverers and landscape architects to the houses they know are there -- even though they're hard-pressed to prove it.
"People call in, they want to get a pool. We ask their name, address and information," said Tina Long, construction coordinator for McCauley Pool & Spa. "Then the [pool] designers come in and look in the Thomas Guide and can't find it. I've even had city inspectors call me and say, 'How do you go to so and so?' "
Building in the nation's burgeoning burbs is happening at such a torrid clip that it has outpaced cartographers' ability to map the latest subdivisions in places such as Elk Grove, Mountain House and Moreno Valley, all in California; Reno and Las Vegas; Phoenix; and central Florida.
Cartographers have struggled to chart the changing world for more than four millenniums, since Babylonians etched charts on clay tablets. But these days, the maps of America's fastest-growing suburbs are running woefully behind schedule at the same time that technological advances are raising travelers' expectations that it's possible to go from Point A to Point B without getting lost.
Even maps supplied by online services, which generally refresh their databases quarterly, or those zippy little global positioning system gadgets in expensive new cars and high-end rentals, are not much more current than many of the maps jammed inside glove compartments.
"It's tougher now with the growth to get a fully updated product to the market," said Edward Sweet, director of cartography, geographic information systems and research for Compass Maps Inc. of Modesto. "Scouting research is still very hard.... We rely on public works departments, government agencies, and they're in the same situation we are. They're so far behind with budget cuts and the costs of doing day-to-day business."
In Modesto alone, Compass gets information on 10 to 20 new streets and two or three new subdivisions each month to add to its city road map, which is being updated for 2006. The California State Automobile Assn. is updating its Reno map for the first time in 18 months, and cartographers are adding 700 streets.
"We have one person dedicated to doing Las Vegas, and it's a lifetime career, it seems," said Jonathan Lawton, senior cartographer at the San Francisco-based CSAA. "At one point, five years or so ago, Las Vegas had 400% growth, and that's hard to catch up with."
The Thomas Guide is drawing an estimated 4,000 new streets in the combined Riverside and San Bernardino counties map book, which is being updated for 2006. In the last five years, the region has averaged 2,500 new streets annually, said Nancy Yoho, vice president for geographic information systems at Rand McNally, which owns the venerable map-book maker.
"I think the only faster-growing area we have is Phoenix, which adds about 3,000 to 3,500 new streets per year," Yoho said. "Our budget this year for updating all of the products we plan to update is about $4.5 million ... for Thomas and Rand McNally. That's for local travel products, not including national products like the road atlas."
Rapid growth is challenging makers of traditional maps in yet another fashion: They are forced to jam more information than ever onto map pages that can't get too much bigger without becoming unusable. The result is that they must resort to ever smaller type -- even as aging baby boomers' eyes are weakening.
Many publishers of national road atlases are now bringing out large-type editions as "a response to our aging eyes," said Stuart Allan, owner of Allan Cartography in Medford, Ore. The problem, though, is that such editions "blow up a state map to 200% so you can read the type, but it has less detail than you think you'd be getting."
One possible solution is putting out two maps for a region that was previously served by one. Compass Maps, which prints more than 6 million maps annually, tried that a few years ago with the Silicon Valley. But consumers revolted when they were forced to buy one map for the north and a separate one for the south, even though the maps were far easier to read.
