>if for some reason GPS were to stop working for a whole town while I'm visiting it from out of town
I get that it's just an example, but how do you figure that could happen?
I get that it's just an example, but how do you figure that could happen?
We know this is possible because in the last 1.5 years this has happened numerous times - people would wake up in Tel Aviv and open Google Maps and find that their GPS thinks they're in Beirut or somewhere in the desert in Jordan or in middle of the Mediterranean Sea or wherever.
You can imagine that this causes all kinds of chaos, from issues ordering a taxi in taxi apps to food delivery and just general traffic jams. The modern world is not built for lack of GPS.
Even if all that happened were a widespread cellular outage, it's unlikely I'd have that region downloaded such that I could still search for whatever address I needed. Locals very well might, even accidentally in their caches, which might let us generate directions to somewhere I could get a map...though it would make it harder to look up the phone number to verify whether such a place sells maps.
It's not necessarily completely unsolvable. It's just a lot harder than it would be if other people still cared about map navigation as much as I did.