Comment by tasuki
1 year ago
> I liken this to asking people who don’t use a GPS how they drive and if they have every intersection memorized.
I find people who drive with sat nav often don't learn almost anything about their route (they don't have to! is the whole point!)
I at least orient my navigation north side up so I have a basic clue what I'm doing.
A friend of mine looks at navigation before driving, then turns it off.
I agree - I had a traveling consulting/repair job before digital maps were a thing. Every year a 50 page city-wide street map book would come out, and you'd buy one every few years from Costco, as needed.
North was always up. I learned to navigate in that mindset and to this day maps that rotate based on direction facing (even in video games!) just don't match the mental model I have of driving.
GPS's gives you a single track view of how to solve a problem, when it's either advantageous or required to react differently (ex: road hazards, opportunistic turns if driving diagonally across a grid), and when you deviate from the single track it creates annoying noise, especially if the road names are not phonetic or in other languages.
There is a route I drive at least once a week. I can do it without GPS (in my case is Google maps via Android Connect).
Yet, every time I ignored the suggested deviations from the "standard" route, I ended up regretting it.
As an example, last time I was 2h late for a meeting because I ignored the "scenic route" suggested and ended up stuck behind a car crash.
Yes I find this is the main benefit of Google Maps GPS now, predicting and avoiding traffic whenever possible.
waze is far, far superior at that
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