Price of European Maps

I live in North America but am going to Europe for a 3 week cycling
trip and wanted to have a GPS along. It is about time to for me to
upgrade my GPS so I was hoping to get a new unit with North America
maps and buy a European map package for my 3 week vacation. The
problem is that while GPS hardware is quite competitive in price, the
cost of the mapping software is outrageous. Additional maps for
Europe for Garmin and TomTom for example are about $400 CND!

Is there any solution? It seems a bit much for me to spend that
amount of money when I will likely use the software only once!

Is there a manufacturer that has a cheaper global solution for people
who travel?

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 19:30:39 +0000, ianstaines@gmail.com wrote


I don't think the cost is outrageous when you consider that you are
getting street-level mapping for every town and village in the whole of
western Europe. If you want the maps you'll have to cough up the money!

--
Mike Lane (UK North Yorkshire)
To contact me replace invalid with mike underscore lane

The cost compared to the US maps _is_ horrendous though, and for what is
probably a smaller area.

That's because tomtom know they can rip off the brits but not the Yanks....

Colin Wilson wrote:

Blame that on the various national agencies that charge high prices for
their mapping data. Some want to recover all the cost of producing the
data, some are even trying to make a profit off the need for it.

The U.S. data is paid from with public funds and, for that reason, is
placed in the public domain. God forbid the American politicians should
ever figure out that they could get money by selling it to us.

If we could get free and open access to all the mapping held by all the
"three letter" agencies of our government that have some (NSA, CIA, DMA,
etc.), we could probably map most of the world pretty well.


Jack

--
Jack Erbes in Ellsworth, Maine, USA (jackerbes at adelphia dot net)
(also receiving email at jacker at midmaine dot com)