You Are Here (We Think ...)

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.

“Our sales dropped almost 40%,” Sweet said. “People didn’t want to buy two different maps. [Then] we revised the map, tried to go to a larger sheet size, and sales skyrocketed.... We just recently started selling magnifiers.”

Mountain House, a town being built where the Bay Area meets the Central Valley, is one example of how growth is challenging paper maps and their digital counterparts.

The development, by Trimark Communities LLC, has its own ZIP Code and has been granted an officially sanctioned moniker by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Its first residents moved in two years ago, and nearly 1,000 homes are occupied today. Five hundred more are in some phase of construction; 16,000 are expected on build-out.

But the CSAA’s Lawton started mapping the town for the first time just last month. The 2005 Thomas Guide for the Northern San Joaquin Valley includes only about one-third of the streets that are completed and shows the development above the name “Bethany.”

Yahoo and Google have a few more streets mapped than the Thomas Guide. MapQuest, the most current of all, shows only about two-thirds of reality. MapQuest and Google, however, place Mountain House’s street names in the nearby city of Tracy.

When Eric Teed-Bose, Trimark’s director of community development, and his wife moved into the rapidly growing town, they turned on the GPS monitor in their 2001 Honda minivan -- only to find that their home didn’t exist. Even when they updated the system, only about a third of Mountain House was included.

“The MapQuest folks are probably around nine months behind schedule,” Teed-Bose said. “We recorded the final subdivision map that created these bona-fide local streets at the end of the year.... It’s funny, sometimes localized businesses will figure it out.... [But] there’s definitely been trouble.”

MapQuest, which gets more than 45.7 million hits each month, updates its databases four times a year. But the free Internet mapping service does not do its own cartographic research.

Instead it contracts with firms such as Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ, which get their information from developers and government agencies and also send out field scouts to drive the streets in an effort to improve accuracy.

MapQuest is “quite dependent on when our partners receive and process our new information,” said Tommy McGloin, senior vice president and general manager.

“We receive a lot of feedback from individual MapQuest.com users.... [But] what you can’t do is hack the database and make piecemeal updates. It’s a quality control issue,” he said.

NAVTEQ also updates its databases quarterly, sending more than 500 field analysts out in GPS-equipped vehicles to scout for new roads and lane information, speed bumps and one-way streets.

One scorching Friday morning in July, Shawn Smith and Spencer Walker climbed into their Ford Escape with a mushroom-shaped satellite-locating antenna and proceeded to update the expanding subdivisions in southeast Elk Grove.

“When I first moved in here, this was all fields on this side of the road,” Smith said as he drove past sprouting houses and shouting signs: “Coming Soon: Raley’s Center,” “Now Selling from the Low 200,000’s.” He’s been in Elk Grove long enough to map his sister-in-law’s new street and cheer when the Trader Joe’s grocery store opened; he’s still waiting, he says, for a Noah’s Bagels.

On this day, Smith and Walker were making sure that street names were properly spelled in their database and filling in addresses where months ago no houses stood. They happened upon a UPS delivery man searching for a street that wasn’t on the map in his truck. And they recorded three new avenues that had no names the last time they drove by: Battles Court, Canadeo Circle and Nevers Way.

Mapping a suburb like Elk Grove is “a little bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge,” said John MacLeod, NAVTEQ’s executive vice president of global marketing and strategy. “You never stop.

“Every time you add a new subdivision or road, we have to go out and find it and add it to our database,” he said. “It helps our business that these things change. The map is a living, breathing thing.”