Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!eci386!clewis From: clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) Newsgroups: tor.general Subject: Re: CAA maps & Books (Was: Tourist mis-information) Message-ID: <1990Feb7.162118.14296@eci386.uucp> Date: 7 Feb 90 16:21:18 GMT References: <1990Jan12.010029.19025@mcmi.uucp> <385@sickkids.UUCP> <1990Jan29.235112.9014@eci386.uucp> <33817@watmath.waterloo.edu> <1990Feb5.155733.23725@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> Reply-To: clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) Distribution: tor Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc. Lines: 48 In article mason@tmsoft.UUCP (Dave Mason) writes: > *I've* tried their breakdown service twice. The first answer was > more like: > ``CAA... hold please'' > ...MANY seconds > ``Yes, may I help you'' > ...describe the problem > ``OK, we'll send out a truck, but it will be a couple of hours'' > ...frustration, followed by a 2.5+ hour wait. > This wasn't in the middle of a snow storm or anything, it was a fairly > pleasant June evening. It wasn't in the middle of no-where, it was at > Eglinton and Bayview.... I had a similar experience - it was explained to me by the Tow truck driver that CAA had only *one* tow truck at night at that time. Whereas, during the day they have CAA cars in at least every 1-mile square in the street grid. CAA's been trying for some time to get more trucks registered but for varying reasons weren't very successful. The CAA vehicles are franchises, the tow trucks are generally independent companies that have signed up. I didn't get a very clear picture of the reason why, but the driver mentioned the bankruptcy/merger of a *lot* of tow companies (including the company that he used to own) and I guess a relatively low payment (given expenses in this town) to the tow companies for each tow. There's apparently only a handful of tow truck companies left in the city. He said something to the effect that CAA was trying to start up it's own tow truck division in Metro to solve the problem. It's slow, but it works and is still worth the money. The CAA books may be sometimes inaccurate, but they've done pretty good in finding the occasional things that even the locals don't know about. (Like a personal tour of the Berkeley nuclear research labs - neat!). We always rely on the official maps - the CAA ones are much too coarse for our wanderings around... We don't "do cities". On the other hand, let me tell you about the Nasciamento road ... AAA on the other hand doesn't give any books or maps free to their customers. Our friends in California get a care-package of CAA books every year or two from us ... AAA charges something like $15 US for the same California book that we get for free. Not accepting currency is common - just ignorance in many cases. Such as the time US$ travellers cheques were refused because they had "Canada" (as in "Royal Bank of Canada US Traveller's Cheque") on them. -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list