GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
When I go to a new city, I find a landmark than take the train/bus/subway towards it but not to it. I get off ~ 3-5 miles away from it, then I try to find on my own navigating the streets in the general direction of it. Yes, it takes a an hour or two to get there, but I get to see things at random which otherwise I would miss.
I have seen people with phones in their hands asking for directions and not knowing how to tell Google Maps where they want to go.
Now you get lost because you intentionally didn’t check the map or because you intentionally didn’t ask for directions, and you have the fallback GPS. In the past, a well-planned trip included landmarks or other opportunities to recover from getting lost, and might not have gotten too far from the familiar. And you got lost in a world where most gas stations had maps and asking for/giving directions was totally common.
IDK. Getting lost in the past was 99% annoying anyway so I’m not going to write anything nostalgic about the lost magic of it, or whatever. It’s funny to think that it can’t really be replicated, though.
With that said, in the days before GPS, I recall wandering off my planned route for a bit in a new to me city, crossed the wrong street, and ended up in the poorest neighborhood and gang controlled territory. Nothing came of it, other than a lesson learned to be a little more careful about planning potential deviations rather than impromptu ones.
Going into the donut store and having to pass money under bullet proof glass and getting the donut through a revolving bullet proof door was certainly an interesting experience, though not one I'd care to repeat.
It was definitely meant to protect employees in a high crime neighborhood, at the very least.
As I was reading your comment I was imagining how hard it would be to do in Boston where even using a GPS gives me borderline paranoia then I finished reading your comment.. Yeah that's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.
And yet people did it for 500 years.
Makes you wonder what millions of your predecessors could do that you can't.
Millions of your predecessors died in ways easily preventable today.
"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." - Ovid
For example, landmark-based navigation is good in rural areas but not generally in cities (of today).
I believe there are studies on this, in fact.
Do something similar in large cities except only look at the city's map the day before and then set out sans map using public transit and foot only. My directionally challenged friends thought it curious so a couple tagged along once. One of them had a blast "getting lost" on purpose and dubbed them adventures and continued tagging along, becoming the highlight of trips. Find things you do not expect, good and bad. Keep a good nature and you meet interesting people.
In many places in the world, a missed exit on a freeway can take you 20-30 minutes or more from your destination, with no chance of turning around.
There is an art to wandering, for sure, but this luddite paean to wandering neglects the fact that for most of human history, one of the largest drivers of technology was navigation technology to AVOID getting lost on purpose.
This is projected metaphysical angst masquerading as nostalgia.
Getting lost when you need to be someone on time is awful.
We can love the former and hate the latter.
I throughly enjoyed following my nose 99% of the time. Navigating in Central America and rural parts of South was easy. Stopping to ask directions lead to the best street food, hidden beaches and random stuff ( going to weddings, etc). It really helped me learn Spanish too. It’s always worth remembering drivers did this for 100 years, and walkers and horse riders for many, many thousands. GPS is pretty new.
Getting out of the mega cities in South America was not fun, and overshadowed the romantic aspect of the no gps thing. I spent 4 hours trying to get out of Quito. Multiple police pointed in different directions, etc.
Life changing adventure and the all-in price was $27k for 2 years of doing exactly what I wanted everyday.
I’ve never used yelp in my life.
GPS greatly reduces all of those things at the expense of... I'm not sure what honestly. The article was short on that part - or at least, to me, the benefits felt like inconveniences reframed as excitement and entertainment. I'll pass on this and most of the 'I miss the good ol days when life was harder ' genre.
I don't miss the days of stopping at a gas station for directions. I don't miss taking the slower route because I didn't have traffic updates redirecting me. I don't miss inconvenience for its own sake.
To each their own, but I really don't get this inconvenience nostalgia period we find ourselves in.
Now a few of my friends arranged an informal meetup which I jokingly called “The Honors Reunion” and they chose a brew pub on Coronado Island. I know many San Diego neighborhoods like the back of my hand, but Coronado was a place where I only drove to the beach, not needing any map or navigation, because it is hard to miss the Pacific Ocean segment between a Naval Air Station and the Hotel Del.
Anyways, I asked Mapquest how to find this brew pub, and I made a printout. This should have sufficed: Coronado is really, really small.
But the pin on the map led me to a darkened, mostly residential side street. I parked, walked around, scratched my head, and concluded that the map was wrong.
So rather than try asking for directions or calling my parents, I am a man after all: I drove up and down every street, crisscrossing the business district, basically brute-forcing the map until I finally stumbled on the location itself.
My friends were all there, happy to see me again, and we had a great chat before the big reunion activities began.
Arriving back home, I managed to piece together what happened, and apparently I had just made an extra misclick on the map surface just as I printed it out, sending the pin into no-man's-land.
That is probably the last time I got thoroughly and accidentally lost.
Sounds like you had a bunch of bad times getting lost in the past. Maybe you're just not particularly open to new experiences.
I'm glad other people have had such lovely "getting lost" experiences but I never have so I don't have any kind of good feelings for it. Getting lost has always been inconvenient for me
There's often not a direct causation, but the correlation is compelling to me. We used to have to talk to people, and/or struggle and learn to meet our objectives. When we can skip those steps and immediately arrive at our destinations, we can sometimes miss the journey.
Setting aside the nostalgia for moments of getting lost that ended well (not all do!): Arguably at the expense of spatial awareness, of how different parts of a city or region fit together in space etc.
In a way, the problem is very similar to that of constant availability to others, and the constant availability of distractions to oneself: Sure, "do not disturb" mode is right there, but it takes a lot more willpower (at least once, to establish a routine) to actively seek out moments of being disconnected from people and data not physically present than it used to when this was just the default mode of existence.
And I also remember those old days very well: The gas station maps, the growing accumulation of paper maps in the glove box, asking directions from strangers ("Oh, you want to go there? Sorry, I've never been up on that part of town").
Trying to pre-plan with carefully-printed online maps, and failing.
But I haven't been properly lost since buying a Garmin Nuvi in 2008. My introduction to GPS nav was a profoundly liberating change in my life.
It showed me a path from which to get from A to B, which is obviously its main intent. And in more-recent years, smart phone navigation often routes me right around traffic problems. It works well for traveling efficiently. (We all know this. That's the boring part.)
But! This kind of tech also enabled me to become lost whenever I felt like it.
So, with GPS: If I want to get off of the beaten path, I can do that. I can go spend time wandering in a city and find amazing stuff, and always know that I can get back to any known point with ease.
If I elect to make a detour, I just make it. I don't worry about how far off of my route it takes me because that route is always undefined. There's no longer any part of my brain that reminds me that every minute I spent detouring is a minute I need to spend backtracking, because turning around and following the same path back to the highway isn't often the fastest way to conclude the detour anyway and the nav knows this and is keeping track the entire time.
It's always plotting a course from wherever I am, to whatever destination I want to reach. And I can elect to follow its directions or not, at my whim.
When I get bored of driving on interstate highways in Appalachia, I can push the Avoid Highways button and spend some time on brilliantly-twisty mountain roads in West Virginia while still making progress towards my destination. And when I've had enough of that, I can get back on a highway (maybe the same one as before, but maybe not!) again soon enough.
With GPS, I can become "lost" (as in I have no idea where I am, and everything around me is potentially a new place to explore) whenever I choose, without ever experiencing any of the existential dread of having no idea which way to turn that I experienced in my pre-GPS days.
It's pretty great.
My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.
We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.
Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.
I went around this loop twice before I realized that something was obviously broken, pulled into a parking lot, and actually looked in detail at what was happening. Then I was able to see what both problems were, and did the right thing for where I was, rather than what it was telling me to do.
Maybe there is room for a stalker like lost art in navigation in places where it all breaks down but I doubt it.
The future I see is more one of autonomous navigation systems. Ones that pick up locations cues wherever they are and build a local map that helps you or your vehicle to find your way.
I just haven't used it for a very long time, and I no longer have the constantly-accumulating pile of them that I used to have (for details in Chicago and Detroit and Pittsburgh and anywhere else where I've ever needed a map).
Almost every part of the US that is East of the Mississippi is stored offline in my phone with Google Maps. I can peruse that if necessary, even in the absence of cellphone service and GPS. I just need my particular phone and a way to power it up long enough to write down some directions.
If the cell network is still up but orbital GNSS is kaput, it can even do automatic offline navigation using other location providers (as in that which can be derived from wifi and bluetooth observations). The resolution sucks, and so does the update interval, but it's better than a kick in the pants.
For a decade or so, the built-in Maps program on Windows would allow maps to be downloaded and used offline, too, so I used to have updated maps stored in my laptop as well. (That whole system was killed (thanks, MSFT) so I should probably find an alternative; maybe something based around OSM would be good.)
> The future I see is more one of autonomous navigation systems. Ones that pick up locations cues wherever they are and build a local map that helps you or your vehicle to find your way.
Sounds neat, but the impetus to create such a thing doesn't seem to exist at the present time.
I don’t remember ever not using gps for geocaching of course.
But I do remember that the phone gps of the time, especially in more remote areas, was semi accurate for car navigation, but all over the place at times when talking about 10-100 ft accuracy.
However, I also never really Experienced any major geocaching community in person outside of people I was already going with.
Any community would have been online.
Ended up asking some locals where I was, and amused they assured me I was way outside the map and had gone east instead of north. I did not want to backtrack so I asked if there was any nice places to get a beer nearby and they pointed me towards a beer garden. Those were some of the nicest Pilsner Urquells and Staropramens I had during my visit. No tourists to be seen, and good vibes all around.
Nowadays I mostly navigate with GPS and rarely just happen on random places like that. I guess we lose some of the discovery when you always know where you are going.
Tell people they have to turn right 6 times and drive 4 kilometers and they won't believe you.
But, based on the landmarks I can see and my vague memory that the Randall is "up above us" I turn left on Masonic away from Corona Heights Park, misidentifying the neighboring Buena Vista Park as Corona Heights and orbiting it looking for the museum until we see a prominent staircase with a sign saying "Buena Vista Park" and I realize the extent of my eff-up. I turn away and switch my car's screen from Media to Map -- it doesn't have Corona Heights marked in green as a park but it's reasonably clear where it has to be -- and then unexpectedly I realize I'm in the Castro, randomly?
Punching the thing into GPS takes a second and then the Randall is in fact, in a cul-de-sac which is not what I was expecting -- actually I miss the turn down States Street where the playground was -- and so even though I'm "right next" to the Randall, GPS is like "okay, let's go up the big hill all the way back to where you started turning onto Roosevelt, and we'll try ALL OF THIS over again."
My wife and daughter, needless to say, did not view this as a successful exploration even though I was quite happy with the fact that I'd indeed recognized the neighborhood (and the playground and the museum without seeing either of them).
I don't have a car so I don't drive often, but I can't stand gps directions when I do, constantly changing the route and micro optimizing. I just look at the map and try to remember it. (Admittedly, having a map in a car is useful, even if I don't like the directions).
A related atrophied skill is the inability for many people to find a place to stop for lunch on the route, since they only understand turn by then directions, not the map.
Only much later did various games start to abandon that marker (possibly even a map in general), because it made navigation too easy: it disincentivized exploration, orientation, things like figuring out vague verbal directions, and path finding in general.
So I spend a lot of time walking and trying to follow the many directional signs, which can be helpful. Hospital navigation is a lot of walking. It is unsurprising that many will punt to a wheelchair with assistant. Anyway, it is often the case that I encounter a VIP administrator or high official (evident from their high heels, elegant dress, and lofty demeanor) and they easily notice I'm very lost, and they offer to help and give me directions. The first time, I accepted because I was just trying to get outside without encountering the E.R. again. But the second time I looked the lady in the eye and I said "no thank you! I rather enjoy getting lost in here!" and she smiled and said she feels the same way.
I find it provides much better and needed awareness of my surroundings. It sometimes also helps falling for sat-nav bad choices. On foot/by public transport I often don't even need to check my phone and can just walk looking around (I know, who does that?!)
I feel like most people had an atlas or a paper map in their car most of the time. Though it is possible that I was more prepared than most.
https://apnews.com/article/google-maps-lawsuit-north-carolin...
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...
I'm honestly not sure if those types of events (and their less consequential but more common variants) support the claims of the article or refute them.
I feel like the article correctly identifies the problems with offloading cognition onto technology, but maybe mischaracterizes the scope of the risks, as well as how much this happens with or without modern technology.
I also observed this with my friends as well. Like we are going by car and a friend is driving 50km/h though there was a 100km/h sign few hundred metres ago. When asking him he responds: "nah google maps says its 50 and I'd rather trust google maps than signs"
Modern police radar is mostly automated and probably gets speed information from the same place Google Maps does. Cops simply don't care, it's just "speed gun says ticket" and while your friend would have beaten it in court, they still would have been forced go to court in the first place.
My Tesla gets confused at an area where there are three intersections in very close proximity. It needs to turn at the third one. It tries to turn at the first one. The second one is a railroad crossing, and turning there would be very dangerous.
One thing I notice is that I pay more attention to the road names whenever going somewhere without a map or GPS. I try to memorize road names instead of "turn left" or "turn right" notifications in digital maps these days.
What must go wrong when you are allowed to drive and not realize that mistake after at most an hour or so?
Alas, I'm far from 85, hard to imagine making that kind of error.
I eventually started bringing a bluetooth GPS along, which helped with compass direction and GPS fix compared to just the phone.
Maybe it would have been better with wifi on?
I can proudly say that I have not lead us astray.
It's as easy as ever to lose yourself or get lost if you so choose. Probably always will be.
It's embarrassing, and it definitely adds to my reputation as that weirdo open-source guy who really can't cope ("Sorry, my map app screwed up," said almost nobody else ever), but it keeps my hypothalamus big.
Maybe I need an app that just yells at you when you take a super-wrong turn, or if you're about to be in a massive amount traffic?
Articles like this one annoy me so much, where is clear the author started with a premise and backfilled the "evidence". The New Yorker would never publish this kind of speculative innuendo if the article was for example about vaccine hesitancy, so it's frustrating to see that stanard relaxed for other topics.