Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

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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...

I mean... One still can.

It just has different costs and risks.

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.

Triptiks were great, here's a short video showing what they looked like:

https://www.tiktok.com/@taramstewart/video/73101933919360156...

Pretty sure they used the same orange hilighter when they did mine!

It was a great membership bennie.

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.

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