Sweep wrote:Vorpal wrote:They don't show all minor roads, but you're unlikely to get lost following them. .
Being an awkward sod i am rather wedded to the idea of maps showing the roads i am afraid. And on a bike it's the minor roads I am interested in. If not actually lost I have ended up having to turn back and add extra miles as a result of following TCI maps and their equivelents in Sardinia. Usually as a result of trhing to second guess the mapmakers and the lie of the land.
In addition to liking maps that show the roads that exist, I also like them to be correct in the way they show them joining together. If there are two successive forks in a road, then it is helpful if they are shown in the correct order or you end up going down the wrong road. If a turning is after a village when it is shown on the map as before a village, then you leave the village in the wrong direction and wonder where your road is. If you go along a road and find a fork when the map shows a single road, you don't know whether to go left or right. This is my experience of using TCI 1:200,000 maps. Going 4km down a big hill to come to a dead end is bad enough when you are in a car, it is soul-destroying when you are on a bike. A couple of times we went up some small road towards some sight we were trying to find, and found such a dense network of unmapped small roads it would have required an extensive exploration to try and find what we were looking for.
There was this town with a very narrow high street which had been made 1-way, and once you committed yourself to going down it, there was a return route of about 8km to get back to the other end of it. We ended up going around that circuit twice to try and find the correct way out of town that was so inaccurately represented on the map - of course in that case on the bike you would only have to walk back the 500m 1-way section.
If someone finds Italy adequately mapped, it is because they are content to travel the main roads. I'm not.