maps and non use of maps. old technique of looking out the car window for location

[SteveP]

always loved looking at and reading maps.
michelin maps in europe are amazingly instructive of what you will find, the quality of the roads, the slope of the road ( beware the 3 chevron road!)
great fun to look at and plan riding and travel routes.

i notice now that next generation use their phones completely for navigation.
exclusively. at risk is actually looking out the window and seeing where you actually are.

example. yesterday one of my elite riders ( very smart kid btw ) 25 yrs old, tech connected came up to my house to pick up some team stuff...
started with... whats yr address? ok, you have been here 4 times... you still need that?
now on the way.

45 minutes later...phone call from rider.... i am in front of yr house, right?
me looking out. dont see you.
remember.. he has been here at least 4 times.

he plugged the wrong number into his gps.. he put in 108 instead of 109.
was sitting in front of neighbors house. how can he not look out and recognize the house?
im thinking if he loses his phone he wont be able to find his way back home ( possible actually )

jayssus, weird science for me.

another young guy i know... very tech oriented. software engineer...
would use phone ap for directions on very, very familiar roads...
( i get it it tracks traffic, etc...)
but still.

anyone else notice this?

[Too Tall]

"GPS Paralysis". Get help please.

Seen stopped in the middle three lanes of traffic or just slowed to a crawl in traffic while staring at their GPS waiting for it to reveal where to go.

If they would just look out the window, as Steve says.

[rwsaunders]

I've read of concerns about a link to increased cases of early dementia from the decrease in using maps and memory to navigate and tell ourselves "where we are" so to speak. I say this as I'm getting ready to head out on an early morning ride starting from my front door with neither a map nor a gps...I am so effed.

[SteveP]

I've read of concerns about a link to increased cases of early dementia from the decrease in using maps and memory to navigate and tell ourselves "where we are" so to speak. I say this as I'm getting ready to head out on an early morning ride starting from my front door with neither a map nor a gps...I am so effed.

what will you do if you make a wrong turn and cant find yr way back?
jayssus.

[Britishbane]

As a child traveling to baseball games and practices my dad and I would hop into the car and he'd hand me a road atlas of D.C., VA, or MD. It was my responsibility to get us to the field. I am to this day directionally challenged, but I sure as hell can navigate with a map.

[Bewheels]

This is why everyone should spend a few years riding a mtb in the deep woods...practice practice.

[rowdyhillrambler]

Firstly, I have travelled th US a lot. Always by truck, and I have not once ever been lost. Oh, don't get me wrong I have made wrong turns and ended up in places I did not mean to. But, never lost only, cause I never really cared. Although my wife would say I was lost.

I am 38 and totally a map guy. Although, I am extremely un-technological. That being said I am good with directions. If I go somewhere one time, I can typically get there again. I find it frustrating when people are bad with directions.

A good friend passed away a couple of years ago, he travelled the States setting up service centers for Southern States Co-op. His wife gave me all of his detailed road maps in a travel bag. Sometimes I get them out on the coffe table and look at them.

It also seems like that GPS technology is one other way we have found to not communicate.
Address please-GPS-look at phone

Used to be, "remember where that orange barn was, go left up past the spring then where that gas station was turn right, second house on the left after old man Winninghams silo." I can remember that stuff

[summilux]

I love maps. Over the years, me and my family have probably logged 50-60,000 km on road holidays. We've made it as far NE as Labrador City Newfoundland and as far SW as Flagstaff Arizona. We generally stay off the major highways and often navigate by impulse. We've done days where we only made right turns and balanced that with left turn days. When they were younger, the kids each took a turn navigating just so they would learn how to read a map. A GPS does have its good points though: finding a motel and gas station or finding a restaurant in an unfamiliar city full of one way streets.

Have we gotten lost? Sure. Lots of times. And it was fun.

[EricKeller]

I like to look at maps, but could do without reading them while in a vehicle. First time I used a GPS, it disturbed me that I didn't know where I was going even after I had driven a road. I have a really good memory for roads, we have a 220 mile route, mostly on back roads, and I can visualize what is coming next the whole ride. But at first, the GPS shorted that out somehow. Now I have adapted to using them, I still like to know where I'm going because the GPS doesn't always recommend the best route.

[Matthew Strongin]

I am 38 and totally a map guy. Although, I am extremely un-technological. That being said I am good with directions. If I go somewhere one time, I can typically get there again. I find it frustrating when people are bad with directions.

I'm almost 38 and also a map guy, but I'm technological by profession. When I go on cycling vacations I usually (though not always) print out some local maps and routes to really study them and then bring them with me on rides. I much prefer to grab a map from my pocket to see what intersection I need or landmark to spot than have a computer tell me what's next.

I lived in Miami for my first 18 years and now again for the last 11. I know this city pretty well. I cracks me up when I talk to other people who have been here a while and they still don't know where anything is. And, in case you're wondering, the city is a giant numbered grid. Knowing it well only requires the ability to count but GPS abounds.

[rec head]

I used to think GPS navigation was pretty cool. Now that traffic conditions are available too I use it all the time. I use to get to places I know full well how to get to just to save time in traffic.

[donevwil]

It's one of the things I love about my wife, when we start planning a road trip her first action is to check out maps and see if we're due for a trip to AAA for newer editions. Smart phones, GPS, etc. are wonderful technology, but the more we witness what it has done/is doing to society, especially the younger gen, we gladly revert to our luddite ways. Hell, if we ever do have an emergency or get truly lost, I'm certain every living soul in close proximity will be connected and willing to help us out.

[Bob Ross]

anyone else notice this?

This is actually On-Topic, since it's about cycling:

For 8 of the past 9 years I've coached a 12-week Cooperative Group Cycling Skills course for my cycle club. And one of the skills we teach is how to read a paper cue sheet.

When I first started doing this, no one had GPS units. Well, maybe one of the other Leaders had a Garmin.
But in the past two or three years more and more of the Participants have been showing up with Garmins, or iOS gizmos, and they always ask "Can I get the .gpx file instead of the cue sheet?"
Our response has always been "You can get the .gpx file in addition to the cue sheet, but it's an adjunct; you're still responsible for having the paper cue sheet on your bike and being able to read it."

This year for the first time we had not just one but several Participants argue that point: "C'mon, that's an anachronism, why should I have to know how to read a cue sheet?" They not only don't want to learn, they've actually convinced themselves that they are incapable of learning.

Eventually we started telling them they had to be able to read a paper cue sheet just in case they needed to plot an escape route out of town after someone launched a nuke that took out all our satellites.
:::smh:::

[Saab2000]

I'm a huge map guy too and grew up with them. I love them. That said, there is a lot to love about turn-by-turn navigation at times. During my move to the Twin Cities recently I stopped for the night at my cousin's house in the western Chicago suburbs. Trying to navigate this alone driving a Penske truck pulling a trailer would have been a major PITA. It could have been done but the iPhone made it super easy. That said, I mostly like maps.

The great compromise is checking a route on Google Maps on my computer just to give myself some basic 'big picture' idea of where I'm going. In flight school years ago we learned a lot about cartography and the science and math behind map making. It's not as simple as it looks.

Here's some fool at the controls of an airliner trying to find where he's going by using a map. Should be grounded. As it happens, a friend of mine has a very similar one and I've heard he pulls it out at times to gain 'big picture' situational awareness.

Yes, I love maps.

[j44ke]

I grew up with a map in my lap. My dad, crazy birdwatcher from way back, would get a phone call (way before email etc.) about some rare bird from Europe that landed on Cape Cod by mistake and when he'd finished his last class, he would pack the car with me in the passenger's seat and a stack of maps or the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Usually he knew generally where we were going but needed help around DC, Baltimore, NYC and back again. And when there was traffic, he wanted me to figure out a way around it. So I was the GPS. Those were not calm easy going moments though, no sir. I needed to know exactly where we were, right left north south etc. I have an incredible sense of direction as a result, partly because I remembered routes in a spacial sense, not by names or numbers. If I saw it the route I could tell you how to get there, but if you asked me how to get there, I couldn't just tell you. I had to draw a picture. Sort of a visualization thing, not a memorization thing.

I had a friend in college who had no sense of direction, but he didn't know it. He would get into a car and end up god knows where. Like on simple trips. He once got lost driving home from school to a house he'd known since he was a toddler. Who knows? Might have been attention deficit disorder or something like that, but it never seemed like he wasn't paying attention. I would ride with him and have to ask him where he was going, and he would tell me and I'd say you are going the wrong way and he'd argue with me and say that he was just going a different way but the first turn he took when he started was supposed to be a right and he took a left.

I use the GPS as a on-the-road reference. It tells me where to go if I want to go that way. I also bring maps with me, just in case we want to go somewhere off the GPS route for something or to see something. There are towns that used to have a restaurant or a grocery or some other thing that now no longer have those things because the GPS steers everyone 10 miles north or south and not through town anymore.

My wife likes to use step by step directions from Google, but I think those are only so-so useful. What happens when you miss a turn? You have to go back to where you made your mistake. A good map lets you cut across some farmer's field that has a small county road in it and have a nice drive and see something new and still get where you are going.

When we look at property upstate, I can figure out exactly where the place is by looking at the photos, reading the description and using Google Earth. If there is a nice photo of the house, then there are trees and a drive way. Maybe a hill in the background or a pond somewhere. Geographical patterns and spacial relationships. Pretty easy to figure out where it is, even when the real estate listing agent has purposely screwed up the Google map link to keep people away from the property. By the time the realtor and I go see it, I know plenty about the property, and there have been a couple times when I have known there was a creek somewhere on the property when the listing realtor doesn't even know it.

Maps are super important. The less we use fully detailed maps of our surroundings, the larger the blank spaces in our world and the less we know about it. Just like any reference tool. Dictionary, encyclopedia, newspaper. I used to call it associated reading or incidental ready. You look for Burke's Garden, VA and by looking at a map, you see 12 other places nearby you want to visit. Or looking up a word in the dictionary, you run into associated words or nearby words or words with no association other than beginning with the same letter. And a newspaper - if you read a paper newspaper, you find articles you would never otherwise read, except that you have two fingers of coffee left and 30 minutes before your wife gets out of the shower and so you read an article on credit default swaps and think to yourself, someone is going to get f58ked by these and they don't even know it.

[David Tollefson]

Back in my racing days we had the Gazetteer, and I had one for each state. Mapped out a lot of courses on those things. I'd occasionally copy down turns, but had no way to really plot distances. Mostly though I just memorized the course and went from there.

[Saab2000]

Back in my racing days we had the Gazetteer, and I had one for each state. Mapped out a lot of courses on those things. I'd occasionally copy down turns, but had no way to really plot distances. Mostly though I just memorized the course and went from there.

I did the exact same thing, mostly back in the 80s and early 90s. I still have a number of them and can't get myself to get rid of them. They're too nice.

[bironi]

Love maps, but still not the best navigator. I did a few days riding with a friend in the Santa Cruz Mountains a few years back. He was kind enough to hand write a daily log of our riding and provided a great cycling map of the area as well. The map is specific to cyclist. It include a legend for steep climb sections, dirt and gravel connectors, and much more.

[turkish]

I get lost more often now that I use a GPS (Tom Tom, iOS app) than when I plot my routes on a map. My turn by turn navigation method was to write directions on a post-it and attach them to the dashboard and pull them once I reached the crossroad or reference.

[Mabouya]

Kids, these days - I tell ya.

There's no hope for the world. I give it one or two more generations, and that will be it.