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The No-GPS Road Trip (popularmechanics.com)
Ezra Dyer, a reporter at Popular Mechanics, decided to ditch the GPS system he has on his car and the mapping service on his phone to see how hard it could be to go to North Carolina from his home, Louisville, Kentucky. He shares his experience: I begin downtown, by the river. It seems that if I get on 32 East, I can find Route 150 toward Tennessee. It takes about one block for my plan to fall apart. The street I'm on dead-ends and forces me onto a seemingly parallel road that soon wanders off at an angle. I discover that there's the fancy, Kentucky Derby side of Louisville, but also the Thorobred Lounge gentleman's club side. Somehow, I blunder onto Interstate 264, a ring road, where the exit numbers indicate that I'm at least ten miles from where I thought I was. And yet, it works out. See, this is the way you used to do it. You keep driving. I exit for Route 32 and settle in for a long drive east. I aim to make it to Knoxville by dinner without having any real idea of whether that's possible. It doesn't help that my atlas crams all of Kentucky onto two pages, printed with fonts evidently developed by those calligraphers who can write the Magna Carta on a piece of capellini. So I stop at a gas station to buy a local map. There are none to be found, so I pull into the next gas station. Then a third. In my mind's eye, there are metal racks at every gas station, over near the door, stocked with maps. Well, those don't exist anymore. I don't know when they disappeared, but they're gone. "Try Walmart," says one cashier, as if I could find it. About an hour in, I'm in traffic-clogged strip-mall hell, stoplights to the horizon. The upside is that I have no concept of time. Instead of compulsively checking a screen to anguish over my plight, I drive. I'm curiously peaceful. I can't do anything about the traffic, so I exist in it, placid. And eventually it gives way, the stoplights dissipating into lush Kentucky countryside. The Defender is happy to amble along at 55 mph, so amble I do, down to Route 150 toward the Tennessee border. Read the full story here.
That's basically how I still do all my road trips. Get out the paper maps!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No GPS, only maps? Are you insane? THAT'S A SUICIDE MISSION!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
there was some kinda of paper navigation tool you could fold up and keep in the glove box. Or perhaps even a book of said previous things.....
We drove about 6000 miles up and down the middle of the US this summer and it felt good to turn off the GPS and just follow the road signs every once in a while. It doesn't really feel like you're totally connected with the road when you're just waiting for Google to tell you when to turn next (or when to just stay on the road you're on which is does too frequently). The road signs really do a good job of getting you around but it might not the the absolute fastest route like Google does. Still, I prefer it every once in a while.
if they have AT&T. spotty coverage at best. Verizon is a popular choice.
It almost seems similar to everyone (OK, a lot of people) losing their ability to do mental arithmetic when calculators became popular. Crutches, that's all they are.
One time I was driving north on I-5 towards Sacramento when I had a tire blowout, which I hadn't noticed until I saw my tire go flying off into the field. I pulled over, called AAA and fetched my tire. After an hour, I was told they couldn't find me as I had no clue to where I was past the last exit. I gave the AAA operator the GPS coordinates of my cellphone. The AAA driver showed up 30 minutes later.
Not saying it necessarily causes physical, or even irreversible changes to the brain, but it results in a sort of corruption/degredation of the mind. If your mind is dependent on being spoon-fed information to complete tasks, it becomes weak. Don't get me wrong, GPS is a valuable tool; I'm very concerned, however, that we're causing our species a disservice by eschewing the practice of such a vital skill in favor of GPS. Next time you're out and about on a cloudy day, ask someone which direction is North.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Imagine, no cell phone either and if you broke down on the road, having to walk to find a pay phone (which no longer exists)
Yeah, this was reality less than 20 years ago. wow, Millennials, the generation more out of touch with the past faster than any previous generation in existence. This goes along with the guy who "found" "free tv" using an antenna the other week.
If shit every really does hit the fan and we start living in a post-apocalyptic world where tech no longer works, Millennials will be the first batch of people to just simply die off.
Check out the other articles in this series:
"Going to a Restaurant Without Consulting Yelp: Can It Be Done?"
and
"Watching a TV Show without an Aggregate Review Score: One Man's Odyssey"
True think-pieces for our age
Cooking, swimming, map reading and navigating were all considered mandatory life skills in our house. You don't have to do them all every day, but you have to know how. My children learned to use a Tomas Brothers map in L.A.. Before they were old enough to drive I made them navigate.
A long time ago, I was one of the first alpha testers of car-mounted GPS, along with dashboard radio and directions.
After doing this for a couple of years, finding they froze when you went skiing and all that, I realized it was just a pain in the butt, and changed my driving from fun with the radio on and the top down to worry and stress.
So, at the end of the program, I turned it in, and never used GPS while driving ever again.
It's way better this way. Only serfs become slaves to their tools.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Back in the 80s my family moved over a thousand miles away for dad to go to school. We were AAA members, and my parents visited the local AAA and got a TripTik. It seems they still have them (at least in name - seems to be an app or something now), but back then it was a linear map that was bound at the top. You would flip through the pages and the roadway you were to take was always oriented up / down along the paper. They would custom build it for you, inserting the appropriate sheets into the booklet, to get you to your destination. Then of course you could follow it backwards for the return trip. I remember they even manually highlighted the route, and would mark areas of construction on the map. They would also show points of interest and good places to stop.
Here are some pictures (random sources off the internet that match what I remember):
https://img0.etsystatic.com/00...
Fold out detail:
https://yearofadventure.files....
Here's one that's been stamped marking an area where delays might occur:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-2gf...
Better known as 318230.
You think that texting while driving is a problem? Try being by yourself and having to drive and consult a map while driving. It can be just as dangerous. OK, maybe if you have someone riding with you who can play navigator it's not too bad, but I can only tell you in my experience I definitely remember being incredibly frustrated with passengers completely unable to read a map. I can read a map and I remember in the early part of the 2000s being in Spain and playing navigator with a really good map while a friend drove and you would not believe the nightmare we had trying to leave Sevilla. Almost none of the roads had street signs on them, so while I had a map that showed exactly how to get out of town and on a main highway, it was impossible to track our progress on the map and get to the exit, which required a few road changes. After an hour of basically driving in circles (it was late at night by the way) and trying desperately to find our way out, I spied a road sign to an exit road and it took some driving heroics but we got on it. I don't miss the pre-GPS days at all. Might as well take a horse and buggy trip to another state as far as I'm concerned. The old pre-GPS days weren't all that great.
This is ridiculous - something a twentysomething writer would come up with, thinking he was being clever. Map-making was, and is, a thing - only the medium has changed. Detailed maps have been plentiful and easy to come by far longer than I've been alive.
We used to do road trips sans GPS every summer. Sure, you might take a wrong turn occasionally... but GPS-enabled maps are not infallible. On more than one occasion, I've had Waze direct me down a road which didn't go through. Heck, I've had Google Maps tell me to turn left across an impossibly backed up major road during rush hour - the exact sort of situation I'd expect it to help me avoid.
GPS is handy, and our modern tech is great... but the "old way" wasn't bad either.
#DeleteChrome
The biggest thing is that maps don't have traffic info, which can be fantastic. Also new construction.
Also, there are some really funky interchanges, like near me there is this weird interchange where 4 highways and two local streets come together in a very small area and it's actually a bit difficult to make out on a map and see how to get through it and end up on the right road at the end. Turn by turn usually saves me having to take the next exit and come try again when I see that I misunderstood the map the first time.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Get on I65 South in Louisville until you come to I40. Go east.
Or, get on I71 east, until you get to I75 South, then pick up I40 east.
Who needs a map?
NORTH CAROLINA TO KENTUCKY? He's lucky he wasn't eaten by cannibals or found dead after the spring thaw. This is a stupid article. It's not even ironically amusing, it's just pathetic.
Reminds me of the Asimov story "The Feeling of Power" in which multiplication can really be done by hand :)
Seriously. With the proliferation and addiction of cellphones, cheap gps and mobile internet, I'm honestly surprised anybody even knows how to read a map anymore.
This is a good experience for the lot of you. Next time, get you a nice up-to-date atlas and plan your trip ahead of time. This sort of thing should be a requirement for high school graduation.
Don't let your analog skills diminish to the point that you are relearning the basics again. We are all spoiled with always connected internet access, cheap GPS, personal assistants, and a host of other connected devices designed to take the brainpower out of everything and extend your comfort zone into dangerous places.
This creates a huge weakpoint in our population. Imagine the crazy bullshit that would kick off if an EMP was to go off over a large American city, or a solar-flare blasts the entire west coast. The possible scenarios that could result in the compromise of our beloved electrical grid, comms infrastructure, and emergency services range from mundane all the way up to apocalyptic. With the coming proliferation of electric vehicles and other form of green(er) energy, we will only become more vulnerable.
Do yourself a favor. Don't let those analog skills die. Keep a map and compass with the flashlight/toolkit/blanket/water emergency kit you keep in your trunk. Use it from time to time, if for no other reason, than to remind yourself what a great investment that $1000+ cell phone is every 2 years.
Keep a good pair of hiking boots around too, you can thank me later.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
But the GPS said to go this way!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Who uses a map to navigate an interchange? That is what signs are for.
Seriously, what's so clever about ditching GPS? Anyone over the age of 40 has done this without considering it a big deal (or worthy of posting on /.). People traversed continents for centuries without GPS.
For those who post about how dangerous it is to look at maps while driving - don't. Whenever I took a long road trip in the days before GPS I consulted the map beforehand and made simple notes - what junction to take, which direction etc. Hardly rocket science.....
Around 2000, I spent over a month one summer driving around the US with camping gear, a stack of AAA maps, AAA books for each state listing campgrounds, and no plan other than to see interesting things like national parks. I drove around 10,000 miles. Most mornings, I spread out a map on the picnic table and figured out where to go that day and where I would be able to sleep or shop if necessary. No GPS and a basic analog/digital cell phone that kind of worked (analog, $0.69/minute roaming) in most non-mountain areas. It was an unforgettable experience. It's a shame if newer travelers are unable to experience some of these things.
As the driver found out, USA atlas with 1-2 pages per state should be in the toolkit purely as a backup map. AAA still has good state-level paper maps that are usable for everything except in-city driving and are good for trip planning even with a GPS.
On most trips, I still try to carry the state-level maps and usually use them a couple of times for something. I have yet to see a good way on a small-screen phone or GPS to answer questions like "how far away is the coast," or "how much out of our way would it be to go to that town" or "what's the next sizable town within 2 miles of the road we are on," which a glance at a paper map answers. GPS will tell you the closest town but it may be way off your route.
I do think GPS has been a big benefit for safety. Reading maps while driving was never safe but often necessary before GPS.
This guy's an idiot. I'm all in agreement that road signs are inadequate, and most places don't have anywhere near enough (other than specific tourist destinations like the Orlando area (where it's probably sponsored)), but there ARE such things as printed maps, or pre-trip research on Google Maps, or just knowing the area that you live in.
The only problem with this idea is this.. If you don't know where you are and what direction is which, a Road Atlas is useless. Just knowing that you are "somewhere on I-80 and the ground is hilly" is going to be a problem without a bit more information. Not to mention you kind of need to know how to read a paper map that doesn't automatically adjust to point in the direction you are traveling.
Of course, you *could* ask one of the drivers milling a truck stop about where you are and which way is north, but again, if you don't know how to relate that to a paper map you will be lost again in short order.
In my experience, the kids coming out of our great public schools today barely know basic geometry and are thus going to be totally hopeless with that paper map. Heaven help us should the GPS satellites ever stop working...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
REI still hawks and provides a course on using a compass. They charge quite a bit for it and push it pretty hard in all their emails.
But the REI stores don't carry paper Topo navigation maps anymore. All the store help knows is "get a Garmin".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Back in my day I didn't have GPS or cell phones. I did field service for point of sale systems going to mom and pop stores all of the southeast in tiny little towns. I was usually given directions by my boss that were similar to a Larry the Cable guy skit.I had no problem reading a map, changing the am radio station, shifting gears, drinking a beer, while smoking a cigarette. Kids today just can't multitask.
See, this is the way you used to do it. You keep driving.
This is not how you used to do it. This is what you do now because GPS will update for you. If you're using a map, then you pull over and find the road you're on or ask someone. In the worst case you keep driving until you find a cross road that is on the map too.
You may keep driving if you have decent sense of direction and know that you can get back on your route. But obviously this person was not capable of that. And you certainly don't decide to get a map while your already lost. Hell, I still keep an atlas in the back seat pocket, just in case.
Back when I was a rich guy and could afford $80 a Hobb's hour to fly, an acquaintance of mine answered this when asked," What's your flight plan?"
He held up his aviation Garmin and said this, "Right here!"
Garmin's are flaky to this day. He ended up on my tail - with my charts and everything.
Technology fails. It will fail.
Gimme a compass and an altimeter and I'll find my way ....
Look, I love technology as much as the next guy (possibly much more when the next guy isn't on slashdot), but... I mean... really?
Roads and cars do not need GPS to function. They have existed in more-or-less the same form for decades and have not really changed since GPS became mainstream.
I usually absolutely disagree with alarmists that say technology is going to "ruin" people, but seriously, if people consider being able to drive your car to a different state without GPS to be "an accomplishment", I think we have a problem.
A few years back I went to a foreign country and my GPS stopped working. I somehow managed to navigate by looking at a map and planning ahead and then reading road signs. I guess I'm friggin batman.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
...did a road trip become rocket science that requires a computer?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As far as I know every interstate still has rest areas and some of them are called "Welcome Centers". They have free maps of the state you're in and sometimes the neighboring states as well. Usually, the welcome centers are near the state borders but some of them are more in the middle of the state.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
I use GPS apps a lot - but not so much for directions. Or sometimes I use them to find where something else, but then I do a lot of my own navigation to get there because I have a better idea of a route I want to take than the app does...
There are all kinds of stories of people following GPS directions to do crazy things, but there's an even bigger problem of following directions where it's not a huge problem, just sub-optimal when just glancing at the map would quickly have let you choose a better immediate path.
So don't throw away that GPS, instead start navigating again with the phone as an ever-ready source of mostly accurate maps.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Indeed. I used paper maps all the time for about 3 decades. Might as well write about "life before cars" or "what's it like to be a cowboy". In this case you don't even have to try it yourself, just ask us fogies, we're still here!
I do have an odd little "lost" story, though. Once on a lone biz trip to Washington DC area I decided to do some sight-seeing. On my way back to my motel, I ended up lost as my paper maps were failing me. I spotted a big hotel/restaurant/ball-room and decided to stop in for help (and pee).
There were rows and rows of long dinner tables with appetizers on them ready to be eaten, but NO PEOPLE! I kept walking around looking for a person, anybody, but came up empty. It was like a ghost-town with hungry ghosts.
I was about to give up and leave, when I turned a corner and nearly collided into a dinner servant. We were both very surprised and stared at each other wide-eyed. She gave me directions, thankfully, and I was on may way. She was the only person I encountered there. The tune "Hotel California" always brings up that memory.
Table-ized A.I.
Although I do all my road trips mostly using my phone maps, I always carry an atlas of the U.S. when driving and have had to use it at times when I visited some small cities far from the highway and had to go on to new destinations I could not look up...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey everybody, they Google maps on paper now!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Perhaps the Popular Mechanics reporter is just showing what happens when previously common skills are allowed to atrophy in favor of new convenient tools. This is a common occurrence, e.g., driving a stick shift.
I still remember planning out cross-country road trips using just a road atlas. I wrote down turn-by-turn instructions along with mileage hints that I would use by mentally keeping track of the last odometer reading (back when my odometer showed tenths of miles). Because I had to actually keep alert watching out for road signs and odometer readings, I found that I actually missed fewer turns than I do now by relying solely on the GPS.
back in the day of just printed maps from google + map books.
I was on a trip at hit big traffic and had to look at an map with limited detail of the area to get off and go though a few local roads to get back on the other side of the backup (car cash + road work + big event + under sized highway) the other way going into the work zone was like an 2-3+ mile jam. Later in the trip I missed the right way at an ramp split and had to ask at an gas station down the road on how to get to my destination (ended being just keep going a bit more till the next highway and get on) From the limited detail map I saw that other road just did not know if it was an full interchange / how far.
Now if I had an phone I am of been able to live traffic + rerouting info (but this was years ago) and maybe with an GSP I would of gotten better ramp / lane info (when was that added? to most of them)
I use the holistic approach. Surely someone else is going where I'm going so I follow them :)
There were rows and rows of long dinner tables with appetizers on them ready to be eaten, but NO PEOPLE! I kept walking around looking for a person, anybody, but came up empty. It was like a ghost-town with hungry ghosts.
Makes me think of "Spirited Away"... probably a good thing you didn't eat the food. ;-)
#DeleteChrome
...for decades. I'm 70. It works, but it sucks. Basically you have to read the make, MEMORIZE your turns, and then go. On interstates, that'll take you a long ways, but in town? Forget it, you're going to have to stop after a while and memorize the next set of turns if it goes on too long. Then of course there's the question of whether this is the right turn or is it the interesection that is 200 feet up the road. Signs? Signs? We don't need no steekin' signs.... yes we do, but if they're the size of a postage stamp, it matters with a map, not so much with a GPS. And then there's the signs that are big enough, but have 6 trees growing up around them and are covered with a poison ivy plant yet to boot.
Driving has always been an adventure, but we don't have to get silly about it. Use the GPS...
the route is the goal :-) Nuff said
He is missing an important tool: while in a gas station, ask about how to reach the destination, or at least, the next POI.
I'm old enough that I have used maps. Reading them is the easy part. the hard part is getting the !@#$ things folded up and put back in the glove box. Nobody I knew ever managed to do that right!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Not that long ago (a bit more than a decade or so) Cars didn't have GPS. Long before we had them at all, I used to drive regularly from Detroit to DC and Texas. I could even make it back from those destinations! :O
When I moved from Detroit to CA, I planned my route with maps and drove based on my instructions with maps as a backup. I can tell East from West by looking at the Sun, so I can tell if I'm going the right direction. All of this stuff used to be 2nd nature to people. Now I have to read about some person's heroic effort to travel about 500 miles? Really?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Even an updated GPS or siri can send you down an out road or to a restaurant that's closed. Happens to me enough that I don't use it unless I'm really unfamiliar with the area.
Ever been halfway to your destination when "Satellite signal lost" is heard over the speaker? Then you miss an important exit in the time it takes the GPS to regain signal and re-calculate? This happened several times for me, along with the realization that I was becoming more and more directionally challenged by relying 100% on GPS. I still use GPS to this day. But you know what? Usually before you click the 'guide me with your sweet voice, robot lady' button, the GPS app (google maps for me) plots out a course on a map for you that is zoomable and superior to any written map. I take a few minutes to analyze the route, using my brain to plot out the course and making notes of possible alternative routes. This way you have the course in your head, you can still get there if the GPS signal is lost or the app crashes, you are still exercising the part of your brain that modern humans should keep, and you can rely on the GPS lady until things go awry.
I recommend all humans do this, you never know when you will be without a GPS device in your hometown (or even farther!) trying to get home. Its a basic survival technique, and I have learned over the years not to let basic survival techniques be lost to technological dependence. (e.g. know how to use CPR, and don't expect to be able to look up on youtube 'how to perform CPR' in an emergency)
Also: If you live in America and you are going from one state to another, you don't really need GPS, or a map to get there. The roads are numbered according to orientation, the signs are aplenty leading you to the next major destination. If you are in New Mexico and want to go to Denver, just follow signs for 'Pueblo' then follow signs for 'Denver'. Its probably the most user-friendly road navigation system ever created.
That is what signs are for.
The signs are frequently shit. Example; multiple names for the same piece of road, typically because we're all hellbent on naming everything after civil rights so-and-sos and screwing up all the signage to proclaim our virtue. What was just I-93 or whatever gets signed as Rufus R Mumphrey Highway for a few miles either side of some la-la land city. Directions never use the latter so it's up to you to figure out whats going on.
Other times you're boxed in by a semi and miss that crucial sign. And no amount of sign reading will remove the 20 miles of pointless construction barrels you didn't know about and denies the exit you need.
Smaller thoroughfares are frequently not signed with a name at all. The money that's supposed to create and maintain that signage is paying for RVs for municipal retirees so they don't exist. Locals get it but you're fucked.
GPS with detour aware maps fix all this stupid shit. That's why they're building it into dashboards. Yes, it creates a disconnect. The alternative is unintentionally driving through a few miles of ghetto hoping not to get stopped at too many lights while predators are sizing you up.
Frankly if you leave for anything beyond your workplace or grocery store without a navigation system you're an idiot. The fact that the space that was occupied by map racks at fuel stations has found better uses is a measure of how little regard the world has for idiots.
Been in situations not entirely unlike that. Its still not rocket surgery. You get back in the car, you drive five or ten miles until you see a sign for a town. Usually you will go thru an intersection somewhere, glance at the sings for the cross streets, and see what the road you are on is called. Most often this indicate N/S/E/W, ie "North US11" Once you have collected some of these details you pull off and consult the map figure out where you are.
Usually this won't happen to you on something like I-80, its hard to get on a limited access highway/interstate without signs indicating your direction, additional signs indicating the road number and direction are also usually every 5 miles or so if not more frequent than that oh and those will have mile markers that almost always correspond to exit numbers now days so you'll be able locate yourself (relatively) on a decent road atlas pretty quickly based on that as well.
The only place I can see this being much of a problem is possibly out West. I can't think of anywhere east of the Mississippi where you are looking at more than 10 - 15 miles before seeing at least a sign for something that would appear on quality a road map. In most places 10 miles will probably put you somewhere that is on a road map. Even in Eastern Kentucky or West Virginia.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
A girl just asks for directions.
$13.46 from Amazon Prime.
As someone who has been driving longer then GPS has been ubiquitous, this made me cringe and lament for mankind.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west... those little signs with numbers are the mile markers (at least in the US) and they are also the exit numbers...
When people didn't have gps they generally found the right maps for the route before they left. If such common sense was utilized here it wouldn't have been much of a story.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
When I was six years old, it was a game for me to try to figure out where we'd be in an hour or exactly when we'd get to our destination. Of course, most speed limits at the time were 60mph or 30mph, making it much easier.
Through most of my life of driving, I've spent a couple of days when I first move to a place memorizing the map. I also have a really good sense of compass direction. So, if you know where you are in relation to the major roads in the area and can recognize the difference between smaller and larger roads going in the direction you want to go, you can usually get places efficiently without a map.
I doubt that I've been "lost" more than a couple of dozen times in my life, and I rarely need maps.
I turn on Google Drive for traffic guidance, not directions.
This person's log shows a tremendous deficit in the training of what should be a basic human skill. There are many skills that derive from developing your innate sense of direction and ability to relate a map to where you're at. And I doubt those regions of the brain are very multipurpose. They would be highly developed by evolution. They've given up something that likely didn't free neural resources up for another intelligence gain.
My wife and I grew up using maps, and it's quite natural for us. I often use GPS especially for traveling, but my wife is resistant to using GPS, they steer you into lakes and lead you astray, etc. When I get online directions or use a GPS for long distance travel, I almost always check out the route to see if it makes sense. I often modify my route for a multitude of reasons such as; I know a different route is actually faster, construction I'm aware of, a different route is much more scenic and therefore worth the extra time, I know this route actually doesn't work, a new road not known by the map software and other misc. reasons.
I recently went to a Best Western Hotel in Wisconsin that had been there for over 15 years. When I keyed in the address when I got near by (I used maps to get to the area), the address didn't exist on my GPS and I couldn't find it searching around. The road actually had 3 names, and I knew 2 of them, but neither worked on my GPS. I'm not sure if the one I didn't know would have worked, but I ended up calling the place and getting directions. It was still tricky to find, yet right on a major 2 lane highway.
Following turn by turn directions on a GPS often aren't quick enough to get to the right side of the expressway for an exit in large downtown areas with many exits and moderate traffic.
I hate it when GPS and online instructions tell me to get on a certain road going straight down the expressway, over and over again, when it's the same road I'm on or it combines with another one and no turning is involved. This is why I often transcribe online directions into something one eighth as long as the original.
Ultimately, I never want to be without a GPS and at least a state map if I can help it.
Drove from New York to Texas (1500 miles) without GPS.
I died.
Bright side is I didn't have to live to see the day Popular Mechanics would print crap like TFA.
Having a zoomable map of the entire region trumps paper maps any day, regardless of whether the device is GPS-enabled or not.
Signage won't always save you. Especially in Texas (kick-ass roads, awful signage)
Years ago, I was on a freeway in downtown Dallas. I think I was on westbound I-30, heading to northbound I-35E. There's a section where westbound I-30 merges briefly with northbound I-35E.
In Florida, there would have been two huge signs spanning the road with arrows pointing at specific lanes... one that said something like "I-30 West (to I-35 North & Woodall Rodgers Fwy)", and one that said "exit to I-35E South".
In Dallas? The road split in two, with a single sign between them off in the distance. It said "Waco" and some other city & had arrows pointing left & right. No highway names or numbers. No compass direction. Just two fsck'ing city names a visitor was apparently expected to know the locations of relative to a ~10 lane freeway in downtown Dallas.
Hmm. So the alternative you offer the millennial snowflakery is to forego the voice controlled real time detour aware digital navigation system and instead seek out a truck stop filled with overweight semi driving Rush Limbaugh devotees and staffed by townie meth addicts so that they might salvage a paper atlas from among the racks of CB gear and polished nude mudflap silhouettes?
Good luck with that.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Blogger/Reporter admits he is slightly retarded. Too retarded to follow street signs, but not retarded enough to crash his car in the process.
Yes, I recently took a long trip with only a Garmin GPS and was frustrated by the times it would take us on some narrow winding road through the mountains that had an official speed limit of 55 mph, yet for most of the way you couldn't even go half that speed due to all the sharp bends in the road. Obviously the GPS's "fast" route was programmed according to the nominal speed limit -- not the actual speed that one could travel on that road. A paper map would surely have shown a better route. This has happened to me more than once.
Seriously, traveling sans GPS is adventurous? You can get a wonderful book of maps at Flying J, or pretty much any real truck stop. If that's no good, there are things called signs that sit alongside the highways telling you how to get where. I've travelled across North America (and Europe) without GPS or maps, relying on signage, without issue. Try putting your brains into gear.
linquendum tondere
I'm from the future, and I'm here to tell you about the Internet. In the future we'll be able to connect with computers everywhere, even in cars. We'll use the Internet to tell stories. Fantastic stories. For example, we'll tell a story about a guy taking a road trip and looking at his map.
"So... in the future, is theater of the absurd popular?".
No. Not on purpose. Now, let me tell you about the President of the United States...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I drove close to 2 million miles before GPS units were even available. I have one, but I rarely ever look at it except for seeing what the ETA is (and it's wrong more than it's right!). I've spent the last 41 years going to places I've never been before. And by the time I've finished working in a city, I know my way around better than most locals. It's EASY.
You don't need a compass, and topo maps show too much unnecessary crap. The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. Even-numbered roads generally run east-west and odd-numbered roads generally run north-south. Inside cities learn which way streets and avenues run, either east-west or north-south. Some cities have it ass-backwards.
Exceptions are interstate loops and spurs - 3 digits that start with odd or even numbers. If it starts with an odd number, it's a spur. If it starts with an even number it comes back to the interstate it left (loop).
Oh, and sometimes roads run concurrently, so that you may be on a road that goes by two or more road numbers. Watch the signs - we paid good money for all those signs.
Paper road maps are still available in stores near interstates. If you travel a lot, buy an atlas of all the state road maps.
Outside of cities learn and use the 9-1-1 system to find addresses. Again, most did it right, but some counties royally screwed it up.
In 1995 I drove 3,000 miles, from CA to FL, all alone, with no problem. In 1996 I drove back. My magical method:
1. Get paper maps BEFORE leaving.
2. Look at maps.
3. Drive.
4. When needed, call people (before leaving!) and ask how to get to their house from the highway.
It was tough, what with the long-distance phone charges and the dinosaurs occasionally blocking I-10, but other than that it was pretty uneventful.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've been told that some people go outside in bare feet without a cellphone. How silly can you get?
(||) Nehmo (||)
I like maps but I don't want to use them when:
- map is dirty / itchy
- no map
- in a hurry
Also, I can say for sure that gps and a couple of maps apps saved my butt when traveling for business in Shanghai. However, it was very difficult to align where I was on a paper map based on the app, even when taking a while to plot individual points. I supplemented it by poring over barely understood road signs and bus route signs.
In the end I found the best way to map the neighborhood of my hotel (endless walks down mysterious roads to get from hotel to a shopping area) was to find a number of points and plot them on the paper map, then after repeated difficulties to finally draw my own version in a little notebook with the key names in two languages.
GPS's are as you say just thinking of speed limits. They also do not seem very good at factoring in number of lights, difficulty of turns, or (and this really galls me with Google maps and most others) future traffic buildup. If I leave somewhere at 4:30, I'm pretty much always going to be routed onto a highway that is going to take me ~10min longer than the estimate. Just because it can route me around buildups is no excuse for not simply choosing a smarter route to begin with!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Umm. Call me a modernist, lazy, whatever.
But reading the story exerpt gave me a 'Yep. Still as bad as I remembered'. If I have to drive randomly without any concept where I am or of time I'm not happy. That was the case before the arrival of the GPS (yes, I'm that old) and it still is the case.
So I'll use the GPS whenever I can, thank you very much!
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west... those little signs with numbers are the mile markers (at least in the US) and they are also the exit numbers...
A lot of the time, you can't see the sun through the clouds.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If you're not going to use your GPS, then you're either A:) Lost or B:) On your way to AAA to pick up the PAPER MAPS that still exist.
Not a member? This is one more excellent reason to become one.
Also: Even if you DO have a GPS, I always have a set of AAA maps in the car just in case my GPS breaks AND my cell phone battery dies.
If you refuse to carry paper maps and you don't want to use a GPS, then you deserve to get lost.
Hey, you want a paper map? Print it off of Google. I'm not sure which part of this is funniest - young guy discovers maps (something even Columbus knew about) or that there's a picture of him asking a woman for directions at the top of the page--like any man every did that (at least according to women).
Since I don't want to see their ads, I didn't read the original.
But: did he even plan the trip with a current map?
I don't own a GPS, nor does my flip-phone do apps. I do have maps, and map books. And the number of times I've gotten lost, driving across the city or across the country, I can count on the fingers of one hand, and have fingers left over.
He's an idiot.
news at 11.
I remember using the AAA TripTik when I was a kid. Mom would have one printed before our long vacation drives - very useful map. Each was very fresh and contained construction notes, detours, and other information.
But in the end - the giant paper map was always consulted for the big picture.
I still use the paper map even with my GPS. GPS gets me there when I know where I want to go --- but the map lets me strategize and change my plans.