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Find your way around
Atlases provide definitive guides to Nova Scotia
By ROBERT MARTIN
The Chronicle Herald, August 19, 2006

NOVA SCOTIA may be backward in some travel-related areas of life, such as regulated gasoline prices and lack of Sunday shopping, but it is second to none in Canada when it comes to maps to help travellers get around our beautiful province.

Two new atlases show why we can be justly proud of the geomatics experts in Nova Scotia (geomatics is the fancy new term used to describe geography done on computers with databases based on GPS co-ordinates and aerial photography), and one shows how the best data can be ruined through poor presentation.

Mary Martin, the woman to whom I am related by marriage, should have had the Nova Scotia Street & Road Atlas handy the time she was given directions to a house in East Chester that included such quaint instructions as, "turn left at the old schoolhouse." The building had burned down about 10 years before, but everyone was expected to remember where it had been.

With a street address and the Street & Road Atlas, Mary could have arrived at the party on time and burned a lot less gas. To my knowledge, the Street & Road Atlas is the only book in Canada to contain all the streets and roads of an entire province within its covers.

Interpretation Resources vice-president Todd Burt said in an interview from the map-maker’s headquarters in Amherst that his company was thinking about people like Mary when it created the atlas.

"The people we had in mind weren’t just truck drivers and taxi drivers. It was somebody who was asked to go to another town where they’d never been before," he said.

The criterion for inclusion, Burt said, was that the road have a name or be driveable in a vehicle like an ambulance. That restriction left out ATV trails, logging roads and parts of some rural roads.

"You’ll sometimes see a road that seems to stop in the middle of nowhere and then start up again. That just means there’s part of it that’s just a trail," he explained.

Mary’s only objection, when I showed her the Nimbus Publishing tome, was the book’s enormity. At 13 inches by 10 inches and 4½ pounds on my kitchen scale, the Street & Road Atlas will never fit into any glove compartment. In fact, drivers of Smart cars may not have room for a passenger. But if you want to find any street in Nova Scotia, this book is your answer.

Burt makes no apology for the size.

This new edition for public use is a cut-down version of the 11-inch by 17-inch atlas the company developed for the province’s Emergency Health Services. "As far as I know, there’s one of those in every ambulance in the province," Burt said. In fact, Burt would have preferred to see more maps in the public edition, about 600 compared to the actual 389, but had to compromise because of publishing costs and, presumably, people’s ability to carry the thing.

Because of its origins as a tool to help emergency workers get from A to B, the Street & Road Atlas is stripped down and includes very little topographical information. There are no indications of elevation and few geographic names, only some bigger lakes and streams. For example, the Street & Road Atlas includes only the name of St. Pauls Island off the north coast of Cape Breton, understandable because it has no roads.

However, the new and sixth edition of the Nova Scotia Atlas includes an additional 25 place names of headlands and coves.

Just as all Gaul was divided into three parts by Julius Caesar some time ago, all Nova Scotia is divided into 90 parts, and that’s what you get in the Nova Scotia Atlas, which bills itself as "the official provincial atlas."

A co-production of Service Nova Scotia and the Nova Scotia Geomatics Centre, the book’s 90 maps retain the fifth edition’s format and reflect increasing professionalism and a high level of standardization since the first edition in 1992 came out as a soft-cover book. The 90 maps at 1:150,000 scale are the same in both the Nova Scotia Atlas and the Street & Road Atlas, and comparisons between the two can be rewarding. That bootlegger up the Margaree? The Street & Road Atlas will show you how to get to his house, and the Nova Scotia Atlas will show you that you have to climb a mountain to do it.

Unlike the extensive expansion of the fifth edition, which added 5,000 place names and changed the format, the sixth edition is strictly an update, containing, as sales co-ordinator Kathy Chapman explained, "all the new highway construction completed in the past five years." The only new elements are three new wilderness areas, six new nature reserves and the locations of waterfalls, she added.

The Nova Scotia Atlas prides itself on showing every road in the province that is longer than 200 metres, with occasionally astonishing results.

For instance, Plate 9, St. Anns Harbour, is almost entirely green, an area of provincial Crown land south of Cape Breton Highlands National Park that you might expect would be mostly wilderness. In fact, the page is criss-crossed with an intricate tracery of thin black lines, a spider’s web of logging roads.

Only a couple of these roads are included on the corresponding page in the Street & Road Atlas since virtually none of them is named, and many are impassable to anything smaller than a high-axled logging truck. Sometimes the richness of topographic detail can make the Nova Scotia Atlas hard to read; on the other hand, the blank spaces between the roads, especially on the small scale maps in the Street & Road Atlas, cry out for decoration.

Cartographers despise empty spaces; that’s why early map-makers filled them with mythical monsters. Burt said his company would like to include details in urban centres like outlines of schools, shopping malls, churches and the like — standard road map features found in map books like those put out by MapArt Publishing— but the production cost of adding them was prohibitive. They might make it into a second edition, "but there has to be a business case for one," he says.

Large books are becoming rarer, and Interpretation Resources is considering how to distribute its atlas electronically, perhaps through a secure website or on a DVD that people could display in their cars — if they can get the kids to take the movie out of the player.

It may be the way to go because of all those maps. While the Street & Road Atlas uses the same 90 basic full-page maps as the Nova Scotia Atlas, it blows up a number of the grids on those large-scale maps into more detailed maps, each one taking its own page.

In urban centres like Halifax, it blows up the grids on the detailed maps into a third level of full-page detail. That’s why there are a lot of maps between pages 67 and 68. In fact, there are 59 in all, each corresponding to a set of grid co-ordinates. The Herald Building in downtown Halifax, for example, is located on page 67Z3Q1. It all makes sense when you understand how the grid system works. Fortunately, there is a clear and simple explanation in the introduction.

I have no hesitation in recommending both the Nova Scotia Atlas and the Street & Road Atlas. In fact, having the two of them in your car should take all the tension out of a Sunday drive in the country as you’ll never have to worry whether you’ll get home before the roast burns.

As for the Nova Scotia Backroad Mapbook, I don’t have the same confidence. The book attempts to combine the functions of atlas and guide book and doesn’t do either of them well.

The atlas, at 1:200,000 scale, compresses the province into 52 plates. The cartographers have used the same Nova Scotia topographical database used in the other two atlases but added names and information according to their special interest in outdoor activities like fishing, hiking and paddling. Names of beaches, towns and attractions have been printed in various colours against the blue background of the sea. They are all shadowed in white which makes them hard to read.

Some of the maps have boxes containing information of dubious accuracy. There’s "Ferrie" rather than "Ferry information." Kejimkujik National Park (misspelled as Kejimikujik) is said to be located in the Annapolis Valley, while its similarly misspelled seaside adjunct is said to be located in Liverpool. I’m not sure if Linda Aksomitis, the author credited with the 56 pages of descriptions of places and activities at the beginning of the book, is responsible for these errors or if it was an editor. I suspect it was an editor since the author’s name is misspelled as Aktimosis in the credits. We can also blame the editor for identifying a picture of the Peggys Cove lighthouse as "Shubenacadie River." At least he or she spelled that name correctly.

Generally speaking, the sloppiness of the editing affects the credibility of the Backroad Mapbook. It might be worthwhile for planning, say, a fishing trip, but I wouldn’t want to take it with me. At 8.5 inches by 11 inches, it’s a bit large for a backpack, although it would be fine in a car. (I should note that all three of the atlases discussed here have a coil binding so they can both lie flat and be doubled under for convenience.)

But I don’t think the Backroad Mapbook can compete with specialty publications such as Michael Haynes’ three pocket-sized volumes on hiking trails in Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia Atlas, sixth edition
Service Nova Scotia, Nova
Scotia Geomatics Centre

(Formac, 90 pages, $29.95)

Robert Martin is a freelance writer who lives in Cow Bay.