Navigation

I have a colleague who has been an early adopter of technology. He was one of the first people I knew who had a portable GPS unit in his car. In those days his work required him to travel to cities around the United States o0n occasion and I was with him on a trip to St. Louis. We arrived at the airport and picked up a rental car. I had gone to AAA and obtained a map of Missouri and another of the city of St. Louis and was prepared to serve as navigator. He had planned to rely on his new device. As we made our way to the Seminary in Webster Groves and later from the seminary to the Arch on the riverfront, I observed as the GPS gave directions to travel a less than direct route and brought us close, but not quite exactly to our destination. At one point the unit was directing left and right hand turns within a few blocks of the arch and I pointed out that we could see our destination and perhaps we should just drive directly to it. He persisted in following his device for another 10 or 15 minutes, finally parking three blocks short of our destination and walking the rest of the way. His device worked, sort of, but I was unimpressed.

No long afterward, a relative was participating in a family gathering at a ranch in Montana and he, too had a new GPS unit. He was proud to announce that the database had been expanded to include rural areas and showed us how he had programed the ranch as a landmark into his device. Then, one day, he proceeded to go to a nearby town and disappear for a couple of hours. We kept wondering what was delaying him. When he finally arrived, we got a wild story about driving on gravel country roads that dead ended at the river. Finally he found the Carter Ferry and was able to cross the river and eventually find his way to the ranch. We were mystified at his adventure, because the ranch and the town are on the same side of the river. Surely he had noticed when he crossed a bridge over the major landmark in the whole area, but somehow he had not.

It wasn’t long before I had a GPS of my own. I learned to trust it in big cities. A trip with our camper to a church meeting in Hartford, Connecticut taught me that it was a useful device. While we had obtained the necessary maps before our drive, going into the unfamiliar city with the camper in search of a particular hotel was eased significantly by the machine’s directions and moving map display. We arrived without problem and I vowed to take the device with me on more trips. When we had the opportunity to travel in England, I downloaded the appropriate maps and loaded them into the device and it worked very well as we toured the area northeast of London by rental car, visiting Cambridge and Norwich and several rural towns and villages.

Meanwhile, back in South Dakota we continued to collect stories of how GPS directions had gotten people lost. The same colleague who had used his GPS in St. Louis one day headed out to a cabin in the hills and ended up more than 20 miles away from his intended destination, which was only about 15 miles away. He managed to travel more than twice the intended distance before becoming alarmed that the device was misleading him. I remember commenting to someone else at the time that a small amount of awareness of setting and common sense might be a good addition to the navigational device.

These days the database is greatly improved. Most rural addresses are in the system and I routinely use a GPS unit to find an unknown address in the middle of the night. I’ve learned to trust the unit. Of course, most of the time when I venture out in the middle of the night I have the back up of a cell phone and the availability of dispatch operators who can give directions when needed. I rarely have to use them these days, however.

That original GPS unit - the first one we owned - seems to have quit functioning lately. It displays the map accurately, but the touchscreen won’t take input. I even upgraded the software and did a hard restart on the unit, but it just isn’t working. By now, of course, my phone has GPS built into it and can be used as a navigational device. Our children both use their phones exclusively for navigating and both travel in large cities much more often than I.

Traditional map reading skills are becoming obsolete. I think that we can still get paper maps from AAA, but we don’t seem to bother carrying them any more. A week ago when a flight was cancelled and we ended up renting a car to come home, I simply said to my phone, “Hey Siri, navigate home,” and I received directions sufficient to manage the tangle of freeways from the airport around Denver and onto the freeway. From there I didn’t really need directions, so I stopped using the phone’s turn-by-turn directions, but I knew that I could get directions if I were to need them.

The thing is that the electronic devices still can take you on some pretty obscure routes. We have a unit that is programmed with the length and height of our pickup when it is pulling our camper. It is supposed to warn you of any possible obstacles, or dead end streets or other areas where you could get into trouble with the bigger unit. It continually wants to take me on routes that are much less direct than I want to go. It will flash “recreational vehicle accessibility unknown” when I am driving in campgrounds. I know the accessibility of campgrounds for recreational vehicles. And it panics when I pull the camper to our house because we live on a street that ends in a cul-de-sac.

I hope I can retain some skills for reading maps and navigating the old fashioned way if for no other reason than that it might one day amuse a grandchild who wants me to talk about the olden days.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!