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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

Very believable, I've noticed this effect myself. When I've moved to a new area, if I use GPS exclusively to get around it takes me months to learn the names of roads and do "route planning" in my head. Versus very quickly, within a few days/weeks if I only refer to GPS when legitimately lost or unsure.

The thing is, why bother? I always have my phone. If I'm within a few miles of my house, I can figure out where I'm going, but maybe it takes me a little longer, and I don't come up with the optimal route, and now I and have the risk of getting caught in unexpected change in traffic patterns. If I'm somewhere unfamiliar, spatial memory is irrelevant and I have to rely on it regardless.

Actually I feel like GPS makes me a better than navigator. Having the "top down" view makes it feel like a video game, and that's one area where I have a ton of practice looking at a 2D map, relating it to 3D environment, and so on.

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> The thing is, why bother? I always have my phone.

Relying exclusively on the phone's turn-by-turn directions without having any spatial awareness of your own or knowledge about the planned routes has a strong tendency to make you do stupid, dangerous stuff in traffic any time there's the slightest ambiguity or delay in the phone's instructions to you. This is mitigated somewhat by newer cars that can show you the map on a display that's not too small or too far out of the way of where your eyes should be pointing. But the responsible way to prevent those problems is to pull up the directions and study them for a minute before releasing the parking brake—that way, the phone is more reminding you than controlling you.

> has a strong tendency to make you do stupid, dangerous stuff in traffic

This makes sense intuitively. But I’d like to see evidence. I’ve often been in a car with someone navigating from memory behaving erratically (or taking a route that made sense twenty years ago) than someone taking turn by turn directions from a map.

That's just people being stubborn or bad drivers. But it's hard to be a good driver when you don't really know which turn you have to take next. Traffic can be congested or streets can be laid out in a weird way. Navigating these situations is easier when I know ahead of time which turn I have to take.

For example, if I find out too late that I have to go left, I might already be stuck in a lane where I'm only supposed to go straight or right. In this situation, I can only take a detour (can be long if I get on a highway!), block the lane until it's safe to switch or try a dangerous maneuver.

These kinds of discussions always remind me of a friend who swears by GPS and seems to always choose it even if the route is simple and easy to navigate. Once when travelling with him, we'd have ended up going north instead of south on a motorway if I hadn't told him to switch lanes because the navigation software failed to give the instructions.

Nothing dangerous happened -- we'd just have wasted time having to turn back at the next intersection -- so it wasn't really serious. It still baffles me how or why someone would literally become so reliant on mechanical instructions that they neither see the clear direction signs nor seem to pay any other attention to directional clues or the fact that the southward branch was approaching. (It's often hard to tell in a complex intersection where you need to turn in order to get into a particular direction, but this case was fairly obvious.)

I can also see how a sudden reaction to a late navigational instruction could cause dangerous situations.

I understand the convenience when travelling to unfamiliar places but I'm not really that keen on having GPS entirely replace directional awareness of one's surroundings.

>It still baffles me how or why someone would literally become so reliant on mechanical instructions

The challenge is that it can be hard to simultaneously navigate by some combination of signs, instinct, and memorized route and follow directions being fed to you (whether by a computer or a person). This is not always the case of course but often there is some ambiguity so you just do what you're "told" if you don't know the area.

I'm surprised when I take a day trip with someone (e.g. hiking somewhere), and after using the GPS to get there, they also use it to get back.

Personally, I can remember the last bit of the car journey and it's easily reversed. Then I just follow the "Copenhagen" signs until I'm near enough the city that I know my own way home. It's nicer than having a robot voice interrupt us every few minutes with "Take the left two lanes to continue on the motorway to Copenhagen".

> [..] a strong tendency to make you do stupid, dangerous stuff in traffic any time there's the slightest ambiguity or delay in the phone's instructions to you.

This is why in the Netherlands you are tought to drive using a satnav, and it can even be required to navigate using one during your driving exam.

I think a lot of this ends up behind how you learn navigation. I love GPS as a way to build up heuristics of how to get places in a new city/from a new location. I find I mostly learn routes by visual memory and not by street names/distances/number of blocks. I know to turn at a specific building/business, and not because it's 5th street or a specific train station.

If you're someone who learns your routes in terms of facts/numbers, then I can see GPS hurting your memory, but in my case, the GPS won't tell me to turn at the Walmart, or get off at the train station with the green tile. So after a few GPS trips, I've learned the route in the way my brain will remember. This especially helps when I don't know the traffic patterns or alternate routes that a navigation app does.

These days, for routes I don't know really well, or have high traffic variance, I'll check GPS to verify a route, and then use the route without using the app directly.

Why bother? One practical reason is that I can make spatial decisions about my plans that my wife, a GPS adherent, cannot. Frequently I'll suggest going somewhere because it is close to where we are or suggest we delay a trip because we plan to go out that way next week anyway.

>I always have my phone.

Until you don't. It's probably a generational thing but I tend to have non-electronic backups when it's relatively cheap and easy to do so. And for relatively routine places I walk/drive, I much prefer to have the route in my head.

My GPS does dumb stuff all the time though. In the city it will route me on a lot of gambles that don't always work out. And there's something to be said about knowing the quality of a neighborhood. On long distance routes Google will heavily push fuel efficient routes that utilize back roads and even roads that are barely paved.

There's an option to avoid highways, but not one to prioritize them. I would much prefer to spend an extra 10 minutes on my 6 hour drive to the beach if that means I can stay on a 4 lane divided highway the entire time.

Why bother? Because Google Maps shows you the most efficient route. Not the most pleasant, just the fastest. It won't tell you that you're walking parallel to a nice back alley lined with cute shops, or that the route through the park is much quieter.

I find that if I don't use my phone, I'm more likely to look around and try new routes.

> Google Maps shows you the most efficient route

Not always. I live a little bit northeast of a city, and when I have to work south of the city, Google always gives me a route through town on lower speed roads with traffic lights. I usually take a different route with no stops and higher speeds and save about 10 minutes and a splash of fuel.

A few weeks ago I was fooling around to see if my phone's navigation could adjust if I decided on a different route. I didn't even get that far: it usually placed me several streets over and gave wrong directions.

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