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Comment by nchelluri | Hacker News Reader

i chuckled. do you use gps?

It's for the explicit reason I refuse to use it, basically. So I at least know the routes I take frequently and have a chance to learn new ones from time to time.

I remember years ago when I still used a GPS there were routes I would drive frequently that I couldn't drive without the GPS.

But what I really meant by the comment is despite living 30 years in the same city I barely know where anything is. Especially in comparison to everyone else I know they can all describe where things are via nearby business, other landmarks and adjacent suburbs and I am lost at to which part of the city the first suburb they mentioned is even in. I also have very little mental models of how one suburb connects to another. It's like each suburb lives in it's own isolate container and when I imagine it all I see in my mind is the main commercial area of that suburb.

One of these days I'm thinking of just using Anki to memorize my entire city and be done with it.

Interesting. How do you visualise/perceive in your mind the routes you remember? Do you struggle with visualising other things? Routes I remember certainly have many mental visual clues like prominent landmarks/layouts.

Going back to a city I haven't been in for a few years, when things have changed, I find harder to navigate even when I roughly know the layout. I need to relearn some visual cues.

I always use a GPS, but I rarely set a route on it. I have a Garmin unit mounted to my windshield that automatically comes on with the ignition[1], and it acts as an omnipresent 3D map. This actually aids my understanding of a city, because now I know the name of every cross street[2], can recognise roads by their shape, and can see where I've been before[3].

I prefer a standalone Garmin unit over Google Maps because it's automatically present, it's actually readable, I can control the zoom level at will, and it doesn't use data / I don't have to keep offline maps up-to-date.

[1] I added a switched 12V outlet so I could get this behaviour. Many new cars are like this by default, but not mine.

[2] My GPS shows the next street as "Pine St ahead" in place of the next turn when a route is not set. Actually super handy. Also, all roads on the map have large, clear labels, so I can also see parallel roads, etc., unlike Google Maps.

[3] My GPS paints a blue trail behind me on the map, so once I've driven through an area, I can just glance at the paint line to orient myself.

Apparently the trick is to set the GPS to always be North-Up. That way you can see which compass direction you're heading.

GPS only makes it worse. It turns out that interpreting an on-screen map takes a non-trivial amount of brainpower that should be directed into safe driving.

And people will drive safer if we make the roads more dangerous, no doubt.

Safe driving is useless driving if it doesn't get you where you want to go. And risk goes up slightly more than linearly in travel time.

This is the opposite of my own experience. Not only am I not as likely to get lost, but having directions read to me means I can pay more attention to the surrounding landscape instead of things like road names. I can also explore without having to worry about not being home for dinner simply because I can always find my way back home.

Comparing my current location to maps in real time (or even alter on when I look at where I've been that day) helps me expand as well.

And to be fair, interpreting an on-screen map takes up slightly less brainpower than a paper map. This is really important since I'm the type that can get my bearings messed up by going in and out of a gas station. I have no real sense of direction and have to work really hard to have what I have - and always have.

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