Utilities such as gas and electric, water and wastewater, and telecommunications are routinely used in a variety of GIS applications. Because these are such important components of our daily lives, the accurate portrayal on maps of the infrastructure and analyses associated with these features is of utmost importance. Regular main‑ tenance, emergency repairs, personnel allocations, and potential sites for expansion are all examples of maps that use utilities as their basic building blocks. Symbols for all aspects of utility features management are highly standardized and codified, so always check for standard symbols prior to map production. (See Figure 6.79 for color suggestions.) Some of the challenges include adequately representing vast amounts of data over a small amount of space, such as multiple overlapping power lines between two poles or many pipelines underneath a single city street. In fact, features like power lines are so thin in real life that depicting them on a map can pose problems. Usually we have it the other way around with maps: the features we are representing graphically are actually much larger in proportion to the landscape than they appear on the map.