Rand McNally Thinks it?s 1962

We gave them a hard time last year, and they did it again this year.

The 2002 Rand McNally Road Atlas, the bible of road trippers, contains maps of only four Arkansas cities: Little Rock, Fort Smith, Pine Bluff and Hot Springs.

Northwest Arkansas — one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions with a population of more than 300,000 — isn’t represented in the atlas with its own maps.

Fayetteville, with a population of 58,047, wasn’t listed, even though it is larger than Pine Bluff (55,085) and Hot Springs (35,750), according to the atlas’ own population figures.

Last year, Rand McNally’s PR person told us, “Maybe Fayetteville has become a tourist destination, and they will update the map.”

Well, they didn’t.

Maybe it would require too much work to change the atlas as population centers shift.

On top of all that, the atlas we saw is the official “Wal-Mart edition,” which contains an 11-page directory of all the Wal-Mart stores in the United States. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., of course, is based in the Northwest Arkansas city of Bentonville (population 19,730).

We noticed that Springdale (45,798) and Rogers (38,829) are also each larger than Hot Springs.