News & Publicity FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Dec 11, 2001 For further information, contact: James Willinger, president, Wide World of Maps, (602) 433-0616

THE NEW LARGER-SCALE ATLAS OF VALLEY IS A WINNER The folks on Cheery Lynn Road in Phoenix now can seek out their street a bit easier. The Salt River cuts a slightly wider blue swath across the Valley. And you can actually pick out the individual ramps at the Stack Interchange. It's all part of the new larger-scale 2002 "professional edition" of the Phoenix Metropolitan Street Atlas (Wide World of Maps, $39.95). The typeface, lakes, golf courses, airports, shopping centers, etc., are all quite a bit bigger, for those who don't like squinting to locate things on maps. The page-by-page format is similar to Wide World of Maps' regular street atlas, published every year since 1975. Each page of that atlas covers a 36-square-mile grid, and the pages work west to east across the Valley, beginning from the northwest. The regular atlas works well, but in neighborhoods with houses and streets close together, it's all a little hard to make out. The professional edition can be used by anyone, of course, but is tailored for those who drive a lot on their jobs. It uses both the regular-size type to show the bigger area but then follows that page with up to four pages of large-scale maps of the same section for a close-in view. Only the most populous sections of the Valley feature the large-scale maps. That makes the professional edition about twice as big as the regular edition, both in pages and in price. The regular atlas continues to be published; the 2002 edition is due out in January. The 2002 regular edition will be slightly more up-to-date than the professional one, because it had a later deadline. I'm a huge fan of the Wide World of Maps' street atlas and use it regularly because of its unmatched accuracy and because it keeps up with the hundreds of annual street and freeway changes. The enlarged maps of Sky Harbor International Airport, Arizona State University, downtown Phoenix and other key areas of the Valley provide wonderful detail. But if you have to look up something in a hurry in the new professional edition, you may trip over pages of regular maps interspersed with the enlarged maps. On Monday, I was trying to locate the area around 16th Street and Northern Avenue for someone, and it took about a minute to sift through the big and small maps before finding it. With practice, of course, the searching gets easier, but if you must know where something is right now, leafing through big- and small-type maps can be frustrating. Overall, I'll give Wide World of Maps' professional edition plenty of points for a good effort. But it's an extremely difficult job to make maps easy to read and simple to follow. • Piece by piece, the rebuilding of U.S. 93 continues between the Valley and Las Vegas. A 5.1-mile section of divided highway opened Monday in the Kaiser Spring area southeast of Wikieup, a $27.5 million project midway between Wickenburg and Kingman. The new highway includes two 1,000-foot bridges over Kaiser Spring. About 10 of the 35 miles of U.S. 93 between Wikieup and the Santa Maria River have been widened to four lanes, and an additional 7.5-mile section will open next year. ###

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