COLUMBUS, Ohio – Used to be, Dad would stuff a half-dozen maps in the glove box before setting out with the family on a road trip to see the waterfalls at Yosemite or the granite faces of Mount Rushmore. Colorful maps bearing the logos of the oil companies that printed them – names like Texaco, Gulf, Esso – once brimmed from displays at filling stations, free for the taking.

But of the more than 35 million Americans expected to travel by car this Independence Day, a good chunk will probably reach for technology before they’re tempted to unfold – and in a tradition that used to bind Americans as tightly as a highway cloverleaf, try to refold – a paper road map.

Websites like MapQuest and Google Maps simplified trip planning. Affordable GPS devices and built-in navigation on smartphones downright transformed it – and transportation agencies around the country are noticing, printing fewer maps to cut department costs or just acknowledging that public demand is down.

In late June, at the annual exposition of the Road Map Collectors Association in Dublin, Ohio, collector Terry Palmer was selling some of his beloved maps. The 65-year-old from Dallas, Texas, wore a T-shirt with intricate route lines of the United States on his chest, back and arms.

“The GPS of course now being so available, a lot of new cars are coming out with built-in GPS. People are utilizing those, and they don’t want a road map,” he said. “A lot of the younger generation, they’re used to having their phone, and they don’t need a road map to figure out where to go.”

Popular with visitors

In Georgia, officials are printing about 1.6 million maps to cover a two-year period – less than half of what they were printing a decade ago. In Pennsylvania, where officials say public demand has gone down, about 750,000 maps are being printed – way down from more than 3 million in 2000.

Officials in Oklahoma and Ohio also say map printing is down, and Washington state discontinued them altogether by 2009 because of budget shortfalls.

But in other states, printing has remained steady because maps remain popular at visiting centers. In Missouri, officials say they’re printing about 1.5 million maps for a two- to three-year period, consistent with printing from a decade ago. Officials in Connecticut, Mississippi and Nebraska also say printing has remained the same.

Lifetime collectors

At the collectors’ association exposition, a carpeted ballroom at an Embassy Suites hotel outside Columbus featured old road maps for sale, and gave collectors a glimpse into an era of romanticized advertising – brightly colored paper maps promising the sunny beaches of Florida, the mountains of Montana and Chicago’s famous skyline.

Free roadside maps boomed between the 1920s and 1970s, when oil companies worked with a handful of publishers. As major highways were being built, those maps became synonymous with the possibilities of the open road.

Dick Bloom, a founding member of the group, has been collecting maps since he was 10. The retired airline pilot from Danville, Ky., said there used to be an element of surprise in road trips.

“The paper map was all you had back then,” Bloom, 74, said from his merchandise table. “It was the only way to get around. It was a lot more of an adventure back then. Life was much more of an adventure.”

Not obsolete

Transportation agencies aren’t the only ones printing paper road maps. Companies like AAA and Rand McNally have been in the business for decades and are just as synonymous with trip planning.

Members of AAA, whose services are fully integrated online and include a TripTik mobile app, requested more than 14 million paper guides in 2010, spokeswoman Heather Hunter said. The number of paper maps AAA prints has declined, but she wouldn’t go into detail.

Rand McNally is known for its atlases but also offers an interactive travel website and GPS devices; it declined to comment on how many maps it’s printing these days.

What most people agree on is that paper road maps will not go away quietly, like pay phones and phone books. Chris Turner, a collector from Jeffersonville, Ind., shook his head at the notion of paper maps becoming obsolete.

“With a GPS or other mapping system that you might use, you feel like you’re beholden to the GPS lady. You know? ‘Turn left here. Recalculating.’ Well, with a map, you can trace your route and you can decide for yourself still where you want to go.

“And if you want to vary from the GPS lady, so be it,” he said. “But you’re armed with that knowledge from that map to do that.”