I don’t think anyone is arguing that paper maps are objectively better than digital solutions.

I’m a sound engineer and work almost exclusively with the latest and greatest digital gear.
However, I do respect others who prefer analogue gear. There’s a different workflow and a different result.

If you get the chance, listen to a vinyl record of Dark Side of the Moon on a high quality hi-fi system. There are elements to the sound which modern recording techniques are unable to reproduce, but which enhance the experience of listening to a recording.

There is a possibility that AI will soon make better music than humans. And I’m sure people will call others ”die-hards” for wanting to listen to humans play music. So be it.

In the same way, I would submit that modern navigation tools have taken away some of the experience of adventure in bicycle touring.

Not knowing every twist and turn and gradient along the way can enhance the experience.

Also never been a member. I did apply for a job there once, when I was in-between. No response. I don't hold that against them.

I was in bike clubs in the 70's and 80's, when routes were on paper. A club's routes were the crown jewels of the bike club. People joined for access to maps, they attended club rides because cue sheets were handed out at the start, and their friends would be there for the same reason.

None of that is true any longer. My 20-something friends look at their watches for turns. I'm old school, using a GPS. Impromptu rides are arranged on Slack. The rather stodgy randonneur club still uses a website and email. We are still required to have a cue sheet for club rides, to support the theoretically existing odd duck who will ride without GPS.

Just for fun I popped over to RWGPS, went to the route planner, and turned on global heatmaps. Lit up light a Christmas tree are obvious well ridden routes across the country. Reduce to last 30 days, and I can get a pretty recent view of the situation. I ride and plan brevets for my region, and use RWGPS and Google maps extensively to build routes. I will always pre-ride or drive unfamiliar routes before publishing to a group, but I'll buy myself that way with no reservation. When I ride someone else's route in an unknown region, I use the same tools to find distance between water, food, parks, etc.

Based on the title and thread contents, I suspect my views and ACA's are in strong agreement. Even though a cross country ride is on my bucket list, I'm still not joining.

Theoretical? I still make and use paper cue sheets. I would get a GPS unit if I were doing something really long again, but that’s not likely to happen again.

One big advantage of the ACA maps is that they contain a wealth of information that might be difficult and/or very time consuming to uncover doing your own planning, like camping locations. They also make great insulation for fast descents when you jersey is wet from climbing. No need to break out the windbreaker. Just put a map inside your top. :D

Good to know there actually is one out there! The theoretical part being if you'll ever ride one of our routes. I've spent hours massaging rwgps cue sheets to meet club standards, that are unlikely to be used. They are, I must say, thorough and accurate cue sheets. Curated, reviewed, and approved.

My touring has gotten 100X better since detailed electronic maps became available. I can select point A and point B, and get a route that automatically maximizes bike paths and small roads.

Paper maps, good luck. You're going to ride with the cars because that's what the fixed scale printed map shows.

Tour for long enough and paper maps will eventually kill you.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but...

Online resources: Beat me to it. I had thoughts of that too, don't know if a factor.

Did ACA reach out to recent-past members, asking why they left? That's critical, because some things are within their control, and some things not.

REI: Yeah I hardly shop there any more, just Shoe Goo for my shoes. A sale price on something expensive is still expensive. I don't like buying a quart of MSR white gas for 65% the price of a gallon (4 quarts) of Coleman fuel. What customers would like is if you could walk into an REI on a tour and get their fuel bottle filled from bulk or a gallon can, and be charged accordingly, without buying a gallon can which isn't going to fit in panniers; Easier I suppose if a group tour and everyone splits one or multiple gallon cans. On the good side, outside the store they have a bike repair station with a bike hanger and stocked with Park tools on cable lanyards, at least at their flagship Seattle store. Last I checked, no one had yet cut the cables and stole the tools, would be typical, but perhaps they have good security at night.

Don't throw away your packing tape. I use two inch wide clear packing tape as a screen protector on my GPS units. When it gets too scraped up, I pull off the tape. Clean off any excess adhesive with Coleman stove fuel on a paper towel. Then reapply new packing tape.

Be thankful you weren’t bicycle touring in ancient Babylonian

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...a11e2e3c6.jpeg

Once you get far enough away from urban areas you run out of bike paths and electricity to power your heavy tablet or computer.
The maps I use (and regular maps) show secondary and dirt roads as well.

One thing I realized this year while riding the shoulder of what I believe is Canada's very first road, is that historically main roads got first pick for the flattest route from A to B. So any other trajectory will necessarily be more hilly and more work. Main roads also have nice freshly paved wide shoulders whereas country lanes have little or no shoulder, rough cracked pavement and a lot of blind hills and curves. Nothing is safe.

And where's the adventure / fun in following a very detailed description of a ride ?

I've traveled in some remote places but when I get far enough away from urban areas, I also have had a lot fewer road choices (and nothing approaching a bike path). For example - in Canada the Dempster Highway is somewhat remote but it is also tough to get lost there. Similarly the Dalton Highway, the road across Siberia and roads around Australia. It is a little different if you get into unsealed routes e.g. outback Australia. Most all these are more remote than the lower 48 US states covered by Adventure Cycling.

I like paper maps, but the choices I make for those remote locations is to use *offline maps* such as those done by Open Street Map. I don't need turn by turn directions (in the remote areas you mention there is often only one route and not much in way of turns) but offline maps do come in handy in town crossings/intersections particularly outside US/Canada/Australia/Western Europe - e.g. I've used in Russia, India, Central America and Southeast Asia. The power draw in this usage is minimal since my phone goes on for a quick map check and then goes off again. In addition in some developing countries, I've been surprised at how much of a major route has cell service (done in place of land lines built out). For example, crossing South America and Africa I didn't have service everywhere but more places than I expected.

All of this coming back to Adventure Cycling. Yes, technology has changed and their maps portion of their business has also changed. Looking over their financial statements that is only one of three major parts. The other two are their tours and their membership/advocacy efforts.

What does the ACA provide that CGAB or bikepacking.com does not? It's maintenance of the routes, right? Not in the sense of selling maps, but promoting it with local governments and businesses along the way. The lobbying has to be a return on investment proposition. Imagine going to whoever at Transportation in this administration and saying anything about bicycles. Europe's pivot to more bike and transit infrastructure is hardly new, so national lobbying is not falling on deaf ears.

Whatever is going on with ACA seems like a last-five-years problem and not a technology-changing problem. Electronic maps and routes are fifteen years ago. I have to think that a large part of it is a steady long term membership of nostalgic boomers that have not been replaced in serious numbers in a long time, and now those boomers are aging out and passing.

I would argue that the boomers and Gen X are the most affluent and active generations in history. Bicycle tour operators and cycling-focused vacation destinations are expanding and doing very well. They have just abandoned the ACA. I have an extended screed above listing what I feel are possible reasons. I manage to spend some time in Girona each year, usually at the end of a European trip. The town is bustling and teeming with cyclists; a large percentage are Boomers and Gen X. I also regularly spend some time on EuroVelo routes, which are very busy again with people who have the money and time to enjoy leisure. As for the traditional touring cyclist of my youth, which had a large contingent of young people taking a gap year and exploring, those have abandoned North America for the previously mentioned reasons; shrinking world, lack of support and high costs instead, SEA, Eastern Europe and South America are the destinations of choice for exploration and adventure.

ACA missed the gravel cycling train. They should have captured that segment but instead they let bikepacking.com eat their lunch.

ACA also never transitioned their maps into an online resource like Bikepacking.com.

Adapt or die.

Boomers are in their 70s now. Male life expectancy in the USA is 76.

More or less agree. ACA does not appear to have adapted. I'm a little surprised they're still around.

As for life expectancy. 76 is for the population, which includes young people who'll die in the first 60 years of life. Turns out the longer you live, the further out your life expectancy goes.

For a 65 year old who's still alive, their life expectancy is 82. It gets worse (from the perspective of wanting boomers dead) the older they get. A 90 y/o boomer's life expectancy is almost 94.

As Barbie once infamously said, Math is hard.

Actually if you think about, a lot of boomers have already died young over the decades, exactly as you described. So if we are talking about all boomers, it's still 76.

Put it another way, let's say it's now 2060 and a handful of Boomers are still alive at age 100. Does that mean the average life expectancy of all Boomers is 100? No, the average is still 76.

Complication #2:
76 is the blended average for every person alive today. Life expectancy was lower in the past, so the average life expectancy for Boomers is lower than 76. The life expectancy for a baby born today is higher than 76. It averages to 76.

Completly ignore previous comments and insert this foolish stat. Boomers are 1946 - 1964 plus you have the Gen X to contend with. People in their 60s and 70s have never been healthier, more active and as well resourced. In the real world as previously mentioned cycling events are extremely popular, cycling vacation operators have never had more participants, and bicycle touring in Europe is more popular than ever. Demographics is not what has killed the ACA rather the services they offer.

If you take the average of 1946 and 1964, then count the years to 2025, you'll see that the average Boomer is exactly 70 years old in 2025.

I have no doubt you are healthy, and I wish you good health until 90 and beyond.

But life expectancy statistics are released by government tracking. Not like anyone is making it up.

Boomers were a coddled generation. Single earner with just a high school diploma and a stay at home wife could go to a 9-5 job and afford a house and annual vacation. That's a fantasy in today's era. The younger generations are barely getting by. The people who are just graduating college today, they are screwed.

Taking a month off work to tour is out of the question for most younger people today. And taking several months off to ride transcontinental is nearly unheard of. Nowadays most of the tourists you see are either very old or very young. Retirees or students. Few in-between-aged long distance tourists.

Show us the statistics you assembled to come to this conclusion.

Anytime an entity that someone doesn't like fails, the detractors will claim - without evidence - that it failed because of the thing they didn't like. Always ignoring all the other organizations that did well while having the same politics or whatever.

So people making claims should show their math.



As far as the ACA goes, I've been intimate with many parts of cycling since the '80s, and I have never heard of them. To me, that says that touring is niche, and touring with the ACA is niche in the niche. To certain tourists the ACA looms large in their experience, but they never had numbers comparable to Beanie Baby collectors. And Beanie Babies collectors also disappeared in short order. Sometimes there doesn't need to be a single reason something dies.

You described my parents that were born in the 1910s. Not me, I was born in 1953.

While in high school, my high school friends were arguing about which would have a better job for life. Generically they were arguing about which was best, a railroad union job or working on the assembly line at the Ford plant, or working as a printer. In the 1970s, those were the good jobs like you described. My high school friends that did get a good union job on the railroad, or the Ford plant assembly line, or the job running a big offset press got a good start but many were early in their career when their career cratered. The expected pension from their union career never happened when their jobs disappeared, some lost their homes. They are not the boomers you just described.

I was luckier than them, but I had bad timing. I got my second college degree at the same time that Reagan and Volker intentionally tanked the economy and ran unemployment up into two digits in the early 1980s. The university placement office did not publish job offer statistics for degrees unless there were at least five job offers for each college major. The dozens of my college friends that were in the same degree fields as I were getting no offers at all when they were trying to find work with double digit unemployment, almost none of a graduating class got an offer. I was out of a job for over a year and a half and when I did get a job, no vacation, no sick leave, no holidays, just a pay check, but it was a paycheck. Now? I am not complaining, I had some very bad luck, some very good luck, and am enjoying retirement in a condo that has no mortgage.

Recent college grads now are starting to have some difficulty compared to years earlier. Recent college grads now find that their unemployment rate is higher than the general population unemployment rate. That is a new trend that suggests that the college degree is less valuable than it used to be. But when new college graduates have an unemployment rate of about five percent, that does make me jealous of when almost none of my graduating class were working in the early 1980s.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/...e:unemployment

I'm the youngest of eight, and we span the baby boom. I think us eight kids are three culturally distinct generations. We share a dad who came home from a war, literally creating the boom, but had different life experiences.

My eldest sister was born in 1946 when my dad got home from the war. Her formative years had young Elvis, Korea, Vietnam, assassinations, civil rights, hobos around the RR tracks, Jackie Robinson. She was H.S. valedictorian, full ride scholarship, dropped out after two years of college because she couldn't afford to live on campus. I was five at the time. Our dad wouldn't lift a finger to help her, because he didn't think girls should go to college and he probably had his own post war problems. Her H.S. friends went off to war, or avoided it if they had the means. That was the theme for H.S. grads for a while. Eventually she married a Vietnam vet with debilitating undiagnosed PTSD, and lived a hard life, living in the boonies on pennies because he couldn't handle people. Her experience, to me, defines a generation. It was not coddled.

My middle siblings and their friends watched their draft numbers. Jobs were scarce, with hundreds of people showing up for a single factory job. My middle sister was H.S. salutatorian, full ride scholarship. Her childhood, aside from have a screwed up and by then abusive dad, was more civil rights action. She also made it through two years before reality set college aside. This was i think the true hippie generation. They felt (gasp) screwed by their elders, who were still sending them off to kill and die at war. The tension in our house and others' was thick, with a WW II veteran dad and rebelliousness among the youth. We had one interracial marriage, which split the family along generational lines. The national guard shootings in Ohio were a generation defining moment. This is another generation.

My generation saw the tail end of Vietnam on the television with the daily body count, Watergate, the Apollo landings, out gay people, racist backlash against civil rights. I was bussed to the inner city to mingle with black kids. Funny thing, we kids were all fine, and figured racism would die with our parents; that didn't work out so well. After seeing my smarter elder siblings fail at college, I went straight to factory job life. An idyllic white picket fence two car family experience it was not. Who makes that crap up? I lived in the garage behind my parent's house, drove a POS car I put together from two wrecks, and saved gas by riding a bicycle where I could. That was a hard life, and alcohol was how my colleagues coped. The bright light was affordable regional college, something out out of reach for poor kids today. I spent seven years living in a hole with no social life, going to school with a generation of lower income kids trying to escape. Most didn't make it, but I did. I think we're the Watergate generation - that event was divisive and defining.

On a purely personal level, what i benefited from that my elder siblings did not have, that mattered more than any of the generation crap we hear so much about, was having elder siblings to protect me from my father. They didn't have that, and in that regard I was relatively coddled.

I will skip my life story but instead repeat the question the demographers amongst us refuse to answer. The age of partipants in, events, cycling destinations, touring (outside of North America) etc. is heavily weighted to 50 and over. These activities are very popular and as busy or busier than ever. Tour operators are booming worldwide from TDA who provide extreme adventure tours lasting months to Trek focusing on the premium sporting end. I regularly fly for personal reasons to the usual hubs in Europe or other popular destinations, bicycles are on every flight and commonplace in airports unlike just a couple of decades ago. It’s the ACA which was left behind and to blame demographics is overly simplistic. Yes their members aged out and they have not attracted new ones in any age group and that’s on them.

Just look at these forums and the obvious older demographic, a vast majority seem to be Boomers or Gen X. There is still active participation here not the complete membership collapse experienced by the ACA.

Because sitting on your ass typing is free, while touring and belonging to a paid organization takes effort.

Still does not explain why it’s only the ACA.

What is only the ACA? What other US based traditional touring organization are you comparing it too?

Whether it is sensible or not, "bike packing" is perceived to be a different thing.

Life expectancy does not work the way @Yan imagines it does, but rather the way @downtube42 has quite clearly explained it does; retired social sci person here.

An American man who is 65 can expect to live another 17.48 years, an American women of the same age can expect to live another 20.12 years; for US 75 year olds, the life expectancy numbers are 10.92 years for men, and 12.68 years for women, per the US Social Security Administration, who should know, since they send all us old folks money every month:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Boomers are not in fact all on the verge of death, but probably are mostly cutting back on touring as we age.

I would invite those arguing for the "go woke, go broke" theory (or the "they missed gravel" theory, or any other theory rooted in anything ACA has done, or not done) to name one (1) dues-based American membership organization that has thrived or grown during the last 10, 20, 30, or 40 years. Not just cycling-oriented organizations, literally any organization that you have to pay to be a member of. Just one will do. Especially if they publish a "magazine"- you know, those things you can't buy anywhere near where you live any more.

[Cue crickets]