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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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