I still get them from AAA - I refresh my State of CA map, the Southwest States map, and a few for Orange County area as well.
Hmmm - been a few years. Need to stop by the office again.
I miss the Trip-Tiks they made.
As a countering bit of anecdata, I only ever seem to hear about elderly folks doing that sort of thing.
I always grabbed the map, and a highlighter pen, and marked my destination on the map, then looked at the possible routes and decide which way to go. Then I would plan where to stop for the night, and figure out meals, rest/gas stops and a budget.
Yep, lots of work based road trips. And of course growing up in the era of loading the kids in the car and taking off on road trip vacations.
One extra resource back in the day was the local phone book, which would have a rudimentary street map for the town or city it served. I remember stopping at phone booths to find out the layout of a town. The challenge then was finding a phone book that didn’t have that map ripped out. The challenge today would be to find a phone booth or a phone book.
No problem here. I had very little trouble finding address in Japan using a Japanese street atlas and only basic knowledge of the written language.
Also, had no problem while traveling in China with regular streets maps without any English on them. FTR, I don’t know Chinese. 
Cool! Basically remembered it right based on a five minute conversation 30 some years ago. Now if I could only remember what my wife asked me to pick up on the way home. . .
On a trip back to Salt Lake when my older sister also came back, it turns out that she had shifted the directions 90 degrees her entire life. She knew North was “up” and so assumed up the hill was North and not East.
The funny thing is that many couples would do better to have the wife drive and the man navigate.
And for people who don’t know, it’s absolutely necessary to have a map or GPS for finding address in Japan.
Most streets don’t have names, instead neighborhoods are names and address run around the block.
Navigating in Taiwan where streets are named and numbers run consecutively down the street is soooooo much easier.
After 60 years of experience, I can open a road atlas at random, pick two points, and within seconds my eye will synch right to the route that will most likely combine all the travel efficiency and roadside features and driving experiences that will maximize my own idea of the pleasure of my trip. A picture that is impossible to get an overview of using any online mapping feature that I know of.
As far as I know, all roads are still signposted with numbers that correspond with the numbers identifying the highways on the paper map, with analog arrows at the junctions… If you want me to go by Interstate, I can get up out of my chair and drive directly to any major city in the USA right now, without ever looking at any map.
I said “probably,” but I’ve only used a Streetfinder map. If a Rand McNally Road Atlas doesn’t have the same kind of listing/index in the back I’d probably be fucked.
I’m not so young that I haven’t had to use paper maps. Used to do it quite a lot, actually. So yes, assuming you’re not sending me to a location that doesn’t exist on an out-of-date map, I got this.
I can’t imagine in what way this would even be difficult, except other than numbering systems varying from town to town (like how in Manhattan the street addresses don’t line up the way they would in other cities), and the possibility of different streets having the same name in different parts of town, but I am assuming an address and a map that gives clues as to where the actual address numbers are, and in the case of a roads with the same name that might exist in different parts of the city, a district number or subdivision name or something else is given in the address and identified on the map.
I would have no problem. It would be interesting to see this poll in 20 years. 
Surprisingly, the magazine section of Target usually carries pretty good local maps. I’ve gone to them in a couple cities specifically for maps.
I think all the people who said they could do it didn’t consider the last step. The OP didn’t say whether the city map had a street locator. My mother grew up at the following address: 836 S. Alden St., Phila., PA. I defy you to find it without access to a street locator. It ran for a whole two blocks. Google will find it, of course.
Yeah I had to do this when I was health aide and go to new clients home in unfamiliar town. I had a Rand McNally Road Atlas and study it the night before I had to go to work.
Yep. '63 Mercedes had that configuration. I kick-start my motorcycles and can ride one with a foot-clutch and tank shift.
This.
It’s a national-level atlas. The smallest detail listed is medium-sized towns. The intent of this atlas is to get you from anywhere in the US/Canada into the right county in the right state/province. For a big city, related suburb, or a big free-standing town it’ll get you to the town center or crossroads. After that you need a local detail map or directions to go the last couple miles.
A city map without a street locator is the kind of useless junk they successfully sell today but which would never have sold in the days before computerized navigators.
Okay, wait: if my friend said, 1234 Jessamine Street, Los Angeles, then, yeah, it’s gonna take some time, poring over the map, until that street pops up. I can still do it if I have to, but it’ll take time. But any decent friend is going to give a little more detail: “A bit east of downtown, near Montebello.” And from that, it’s a snap.
So…are you asking an abstract philosophical hypothetical question…or a real world one? In both cases, yes, I can do it. It just takes longer in one case.
I was in the Army drop me anywhere in the world with a map and a compass and I’ll get you home.
For navigating in cities, you need not just a map but a proper gazetteer of the street names as well, or at least the postal codes for the immediate neighbourhood.
Not giving enough information in the first place would also be cheating, no?
Give me a compass and a USGS topographic map and I can get within ten feet of any random spot you threw a dart at, no roads or address numbers needed.
Most street maps I remember had a letter/number grid (B-4, etc.) and a list of street names somewhere on it that showed which grid squares each street went through. Certainly not all of them, but it was considered a useful feature in the paper map days.