Even with a map, you can still get lost in Las Vegas

Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2006 | 7:44 a.m.

Maybe no one knows how fast Las Vegas is growing and expanding and creeping like kudzu across the valley floor - no one knows, not like Troy Plocus knows. He makes maps.

"It never seems to stop. Right when you get ahold of it for a moment, it changes again," Plocus says. "There's plenty of work to do."

People who use popular Internet map sites, such as Google Maps or Mapquest, to find their way in Las Vegas' newer sections of sprawl know by inference how hard Plocus' job is. The gaps. The blank spots. The little red flags sprouting like misleading poppies a block away from the true location, if it can be found at all.

Navteq, the company that provides the map data for all of these Web sites, tries, stationing teams of data collectors in fast-growing cities such as ours - people who drive to new subdivisions, tote Global Positioning System equipment to tourist hot spots and so on.

Navteq keeps two people in Las Vegas with another 13 who can be called in from around Nevada and Southern California. But they can keep it only so current - every three months or so.

"If we were to shoot a map today," says Navteq spokeswoman Kelly Smith, "it would be wrong tomorrow."

In those three months, a new subdivision may have opened up, appeared in reality but not online because Navteq includes no Vista Villas before they're actually built.

"We're very careful about that because we would never want to send people down a road that doesn't exist - a road that's only a dream in a developer's mind," Smith says.

So if you want the most up-to-date map, you'll need a Plocus-produced Las Vegas Fire and Rescue map. They come out every two weeks.

Plocus' maps are not just any maps, they're maps used by our fire departments, Metro Police, the power company and more. If you've got a Thomas Guide, you're using his maps, too, although your copies may be three months to a year out of date.

How many maps? About 400, each one an 8 1/2-by-11-inch page, describing in simple black-and-white line drawings one square mile of streets and fire hydrants (and also dirt roads, trails and washes, if any). Only Henderson and Laughlin are excluded (they make their own maps). And as more subdivisions and strip malls sprout up, Plocus pencils them in. Every two weeks, he sends out updates, trying to find the sweet spot between the merely planned and too late.

"They're out there before the developments are completed," Plocus says, "but not before they're even started."

If that seems premature, remember that construction site fires and crimes are not unheard of . Bill Cassell, a Metro spokesman, says that each of the police force's eight substations has a copy of Plocus' map and that it photocopies the relevant pages for each officer's patrol area. For valleywide information, the officers rely on a hodgepodge of map books.

Which ones, where do they get them and how often are they updated?

"Various, anywhere we can and not often enough," Cassell says.

In the 20 years he's been with Metro, no squad car map has been quite current enough.

"Every map service in the world," Cassell says, "has trouble keeping up with the growth in Clark County."