Miles and Kilometers: Do You Want Them Both?

Each year as the touring season ramps up, someone from our routes & mapping department offers a map reading clinic to Adventure Cycling staff. This year the honor was mine to explain how to use the maps, why we've done particular things (like why the North arrow isn't always up), and ideas we are considering for the future.

During the clinic, I loved talking about all the features on our maps: from the bi-directional narratives to the endpoint mileages, to the service directory and riding conditions. And this year, I was also able to talk up the new features and improvements available on the GIS-converted maps.

During the clinic, the following question came up, "In the narratives, what are those numbers in the parentheses for?" Good question! Those numbers represent the distances in kilometers, and are provided for our Canadian and European users. This question also opened the door for me to mention a recent conversation in our department: Should we drop the kilometers in order to give us a bit more room to increase narrative type size? We haven't come to a conclusion, and no one in the map reading clinic had a strong opinion at the time.

However, after the clinic, Heather -- who is interning in the publications department for the summer as part of her graduate program at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada -- wanted to put in her two cents on the topic:

"I?d be sad to hear of the Adventure Cycling maps losing the kilometers feature. Canada doesn?t really have an equivalent [organization], and generally seems to get the short end of the stick from the U.S. time and again, so dropping kilometers seems like burning yet another bridge between the two countries. That is my fresh-from-Canada perspective.

"I?ve also taken a straw poll among a few touring cyclists I know. They say that while yes, bike computers do have the capability to display either miles or kilometers, it?s usually not very easy to switch between them. Another person noted that if she wasn?t from the U.S., it would mess with her brain: she knows about how long her home unit of measurement is, and trying to switch to another would be difficult as she doesn?t solely rely on bike computers.

"All parties polled didn?t want to see the information get dropped from the map, despite all of us being from the U.S."

What do you think? I'd love to hear your opinions and input as comments to this post, on our Facebook page, or on Twitter at @acaroutes.

Graphics by routes & mapping staff

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GEOPOINTS BULLETIN is written by Jennifer 'Jenn' Milyko, an Adventure Cycling cartographer, and appears weekly, highlighting curious facts, figures and persons from Adventure Cycling's Route Network with tips and hints for personal route creation thrown in for good measure. She also wants to remind you that map corrections and comments are always welcome via the online Map Correction Form.

Source: http://blog.adventurecycling.org/2011/07/miles-and-kilometers-do-you-want-them.html

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