THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 9, 1994 TAG: 9407090175
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAC DANIEL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
Cherish those old, crumpled Virginia road maps. They're cartographic dinosaurs.
The age of freehand byways and inky highways has come to an end in the Old Dominion.
The latest official state transportation map was coldly crafted on a computer. Cartographers call it the end of an error - or the inability to quickly correct one.
Still, technology can only go so far: Lake Drummond is still located entirely in Chesapeake this year, which may shock some on its Suffolk shores as much as it chagrined state map makers.
The first highway map bearing a portrait of new Gov. George Allen is a slightly different shape, has softer colors and was designed to be easier to read, if not fold.
Folks at the Virginia Department of Transportation released 2.5 million free copies last month, after 2 1/2 years of effort.
It was a day to celebrate in Cripple Creek, population 150, which literally got back on the map. Townspeople there took to the streets and burned up their old, insulting versions.
Somewhere along the line, the Wythe County community between Ivanhoe and Speedwell had vanished without explanation from section F-10.
That was particularly annoying since Batie Creek Natural Bridge, several counties to the west, continued to be listed despite its lack of residents. It's history now, in name as well as reality.
Making such changes to the state map used to be arduous and rife with opportunity for error.
Until last year, details were drawn freehand onto a large piece of film that was then photographed by a printer. Thing is, whenever a change was made, another layer of film had to be added. After seventeen years of corrections, the 1992/93 master map was between 60 and 70 brittle layers thick.
``And it was harder and harder for the printer to get an accurate result,'' said Jere Kittle, a graphics designer who headed the computerization project.
``It was mostly one step forward, two steps back,'' she said.
They're still somewhat in transition, with a few cartographers finishing up new detailed maps by hand. But even that will soon be phased out and moved entirely to computer.
Paul D. Kersey, a 63-year-old cartographer and historian, cherishes the past. He was manually etching an intersection recently, referring to a satellite photograph, and using ``my own little scratches.''
Kersey still finds beauty in the aesthetics of maps - the smooth lines formed by a river or the shadows that represent mountain ranges.
He's thrilled by the new technology, but hopes there's a way to retain the art in cartography.
``There's so much going on that I can't keep up,'' he said. ``I think it's great, but you still have to have a bit of the old too.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
SCOTT BROWN
Dwayne Altice, a cartographic drafter, works on a digitized state
map.
NEW MAP: COMPUTER-DRAWN
OLD MAP: HAND-DRAWN
The new map has softer colors and was designed to be easier to read.
It also includes Cripple Creek, a tiny town in Western Virginia that
had vanished from the map sometime in the past.
by CNB