5 ms·

Get lost and have to stop/call for directions? Abandoning modern technology doesn't seem like the better alternative in this case.

by ctrl-j 8y ago

SamReidHughes 8y ago
Spend a few minutes looking at a map before the trip?
- gjs278 8y ago
  road closed. detours. insane levels of traffic you didn't anticipate. have fun.
  - themoat 8y ago
    This comment kind of reads like the lead-in to a bad infomercial. It's not that dramatic.
  - huntie 8y ago
    None of these are problems with proper planning. I usually add an hour for every three hours of driving as a buffer. It's worth noting that GPS doesn't solve this either. If there's an accident a few miles ahead of you that blocks the road you run into the same problem.
  - hawski 8y ago
    I had twice in a short time span a closed road that Google Maps did not know anything about. It was useless, because it constantly routed me to the closed segment of the road. I had to manually select some far away point to finally get it to ignore the road almost completely, because I did not know how much of it was closed. One was on a German side of a major highway connecting Germany and Poland. The other on Berlin's main highway. It was after midnight so it was a challenge, but it probably was a scheduled maintenance.
- timrichard 8y ago
  Got to say, that's my preferred method as a public transport user/pedestrian in London who sometimes goes to unfamiliar parts of town. A few minutes with the map beforehand and the help of a button compass (Suunto Clipper is my favourite), and I seem to get to the destination very easily when a few street names and bearings are committed to memory. I used to get to the destination station, and would wait for the phone to get a reliable connection to download the map tiles... then the dodgy phone "compass"/magnetometer needed calibration, so wave it in a figure eight for a while, try to reconcile surroundings with arrow that keeps flipping direction, etc. I get on much better with "south out of station, left onto X street, right onto Y street, final left onto Z street, then watch out for that building eyeballed on Google Streetview earlier".
- perl4ever 8y ago
  You can even just go by street signs and general directions sometimes. I don't know if I have any paper maps any more. Plus, you know, reading maps while driving is probably as dangerous as texting. The other day, I left home intending to go to a hospital near where I live. As I usually do, I plugged my phone into my car and tried to tell it to navigate there. But for some reason it hung while trying to contact Google to locate the address. So I rebooted my phone, and rebooted my car, to no avail. Eventually I gave up, and based on the general knowledge that the hospital was to the south east, took one of the main roads through the city east, until I saw the first of several blue "H" signs directing me to the hospital. My car has an electronic compass as well, if I didn't know which way was east/south.
kleiba 8y ago
First of all, not having a GPS does not automatically imply getting lost. People used to be able to navigate just fine most of the time before that technology was available. And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? I've been asked many times in the olden days and never once was it an unpleasant experience.
- jonknee 8y ago
  > And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? The frequently terrible answers!
- gjs278 8y ago
  >And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? completely wasting their time. use your phone.
- scarface74 8y ago
  And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? Ask this 14 year old.... https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/us/michigan-man-shoots-at-teen-asking-for-directions/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/us/michigan-man-shoots-at-tee... The last thing I want to do is be lost somewhere in the South. Yes I live in the south.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Thanks for the anecdote. Doesn't prove a thing.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      If I got lost somewhere where there are no stores for miles around I would never walk up and ask for directions at someone's house or if my car broke down (https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/us/michigan-woman-shot/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/us/michigan-woman-shot/index....). The "anecdote" is even in my own neighborhood, if my son invites some of his White friends (who are his guests) to hang out at our neighborhood pool. He gets asked does he belong there? Do you think I would leave him in a position to have to walk up and ask a random stranger for directions if he got lost while driving? It was sheer luck that both the teenager didn't die and the guys own camera showed he was lying. If the boy had been killed the man would have gotten off. If the camera hadn't been there, they would have taken the word of "upstanding member of society -- a retired fireman" over the word of "just another teenage thug" and the boy would have been arrested.
jimmy1 8y ago
> Get lost and have to stop/call for directions? Why is, it in these type of questions, people always immediately go to the worst case scenario to try and prove their point? What about the average case: people again learn to plan their routes in advance, use their instincts, road signs, and if necessary, how to use a map. You also assume you can't get lost using a GPS. All data has the potential to be stale. Maybe the route the gps took you is through a mountainous road where there is no signal. What happens when you come across an unfamiliar geographical feature and are unsure how to proceed, and now your gps cannot update your location? What if the location you are attemping to access is "net new" as in new roads? What if the location simply no longer exists and your mapping service has not been updated? In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations. I imagine if we didn't rely on a computer telling us where something is, we would revert back to the default behavior of actually learning our surroundings, which has a host of other benefits that you never know would come in handy until they do.
- jonknee 8y ago
  > In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations. I use my phone's GPS in the wilderness all the time and it's an amazing help. Having a topo map where you can see exactly where you are is awesome. Even just having altitude is a big help like the other day when I was trudging up a steep forested ridge and wanted to know how many more hundreds of feet I had to go before the summit. Of course you can live without GPS, but I just can't make any sense out of arguing that it isn't anything other than amazing. I'd give up a lot of stuff before I'd give up GPS.
  - rich_ard 8y ago
    This is what got me re-tethered to a smartphone after a several-months-long experiment with returning to a flip phone - for backpacking it's so, so nice to have GPS in my hand.
walshemj 8y ago
No in a city you buy an A to Z guide
poulsbohemian 8y ago
This reminds me of some of my favorite direction stories from life. I was in Ohio. I had just intersected the Dublin-Granville road. I stopped at a gas station to ask "I know Dublin is at one end, and Granville the other, but I'm not sure which direction I need to go to reach Dublin, left or right?" I assumed a station attendant, at a shop with an address on the Dublin-Granville road, would be able to answer this. Instead he replied "Oh I don't know, I'm not from around here." In another instance, I was working with someone in Seattle who had lived there about a decade, had a PhD (I mention only to point out they had some intelligence), and I mentioned I had to go to Tukwilla that night - maybe ten miles at most south of the Seattle city limits. She had no idea where Tukwilla was, had never been there. So point being, whether it was pre-device based digital maps or today, most people have no idea where they are.

Get lost and have to stop/call for directions? Abandoning modern technology doesn't seem like the better alternative in this case.

by ctrl-j 8y ago

Get lost and have to stop/call for directions? Abandoning modern technology doesn't seem like the better alternative in this case.

SamReidHughes 8y ago

Spend a few minutes looking at a map before the trip?

gjs278 8y ago
road closed. detours. insane levels of traffic you didn't anticipate. have fun.
- themoat 8y ago
  This comment kind of reads like the lead-in to a bad infomercial. It's not that dramatic.
- huntie 8y ago
  None of these are problems with proper planning. I usually add an hour for every three hours of driving as a buffer. It's worth noting that GPS doesn't solve this either. If there's an accident a few miles ahead of you that blocks the road you run into the same problem.
- hawski 8y ago
  I had twice in a short time span a closed road that Google Maps did not know anything about. It was useless, because it constantly routed me to the closed segment of the road. I had to manually select some far away point to finally get it to ignore the road almost completely, because I did not know how much of it was closed. One was on a German side of a major highway connecting Germany and Poland. The other on Berlin's main highway. It was after midnight so it was a challenge, but it probably was a scheduled maintenance.
timrichard 8y ago
Got to say, that's my preferred method as a public transport user/pedestrian in London who sometimes goes to unfamiliar parts of town. A few minutes with the map beforehand and the help of a button compass (Suunto Clipper is my favourite), and I seem to get to the destination very easily when a few street names and bearings are committed to memory. I used to get to the destination station, and would wait for the phone to get a reliable connection to download the map tiles... then the dodgy phone "compass"/magnetometer needed calibration, so wave it in a figure eight for a while, try to reconcile surroundings with arrow that keeps flipping direction, etc. I get on much better with "south out of station, left onto X street, right onto Y street, final left onto Z street, then watch out for that building eyeballed on Google Streetview earlier".
perl4ever 8y ago
You can even just go by street signs and general directions sometimes. I don't know if I have any paper maps any more. Plus, you know, reading maps while driving is probably as dangerous as texting. The other day, I left home intending to go to a hospital near where I live. As I usually do, I plugged my phone into my car and tried to tell it to navigate there. But for some reason it hung while trying to contact Google to locate the address. So I rebooted my phone, and rebooted my car, to no avail. Eventually I gave up, and based on the general knowledge that the hospital was to the south east, took one of the main roads through the city east, until I saw the first of several blue "H" signs directing me to the hospital. My car has an electronic compass as well, if I didn't know which way was east/south.

kleiba 8y ago

First of all, not having a GPS does not automatically imply getting lost. People used to be able to navigate just fine most of the time before that technology was available. And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? I've been asked many times in the olden days and never once was it an unpleasant experience.

jonknee 8y ago
> And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? The frequently terrible answers!
gjs278 8y ago
>And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? completely wasting their time. use your phone.
scarface74 8y ago
And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? Ask this 14 year old.... https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/us/michigan-man-shoots-at-teen-asking-for-directions/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/us/michigan-man-shoots-at-tee... The last thing I want to do is be lost somewhere in the South. Yes I live in the south.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Thanks for the anecdote. Doesn't prove a thing.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    If I got lost somewhere where there are no stores for miles around I would never walk up and ask for directions at someone's house or if my car broke down (https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/us/michigan-woman-shot/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/us/michigan-woman-shot/index....). The "anecdote" is even in my own neighborhood, if my son invites some of his White friends (who are his guests) to hang out at our neighborhood pool. He gets asked does he belong there? Do you think I would leave him in a position to have to walk up and ask a random stranger for directions if he got lost while driving? It was sheer luck that both the teenager didn't die and the guys own camera showed he was lying. If the boy had been killed the man would have gotten off. If the camera hadn't been there, they would have taken the word of "upstanding member of society -- a retired fireman" over the word of "just another teenage thug" and the boy would have been arrested.

jimmy1 8y ago

> Get lost and have to stop/call for directions? Why is, it in these type of questions, people always immediately go to the worst case scenario to try and prove their point? What about the average case: people again learn to plan their routes in advance, use their instincts, road signs, and if necessary, how to use a map. You also assume you can't get lost using a GPS. All data has the potential to be stale. Maybe the route the gps took you is through a mountainous road where there is no signal. What happens when you come across an unfamiliar geographical feature and are unsure how to proceed, and now your gps cannot update your location? What if the location you are attemping to access is "net new" as in new roads? What if the location simply no longer exists and your mapping service has not been updated? In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations. I imagine if we didn't rely on a computer telling us where something is, we would revert back to the default behavior of actually learning our surroundings, which has a host of other benefits that you never know would come in handy until they do.

jonknee 8y ago
> In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations. I use my phone's GPS in the wilderness all the time and it's an amazing help. Having a topo map where you can see exactly where you are is awesome. Even just having altitude is a big help like the other day when I was trudging up a steep forested ridge and wanted to know how many more hundreds of feet I had to go before the summit. Of course you can live without GPS, but I just can't make any sense out of arguing that it isn't anything other than amazing. I'd give up a lot of stuff before I'd give up GPS.
- rich_ard 8y ago
  This is what got me re-tethered to a smartphone after a several-months-long experiment with returning to a flip phone - for backpacking it's so, so nice to have GPS in my hand.

walshemj 8y ago

No in a city you buy an A to Z guide

poulsbohemian 8y ago

This reminds me of some of my favorite direction stories from life. I was in Ohio. I had just intersected the Dublin-Granville road. I stopped at a gas station to ask "I know Dublin is at one end, and Granville the other, but I'm not sure which direction I need to go to reach Dublin, left or right?" I assumed a station attendant, at a shop with an address on the Dublin-Granville road, would be able to answer this. Instead he replied "Oh I don't know, I'm not from around here." In another instance, I was working with someone in Seattle who had lived there about a decade, had a PhD (I mention only to point out they had some intelligence), and I mentioned I had to go to Tukwilla that night - maybe ten miles at most south of the Seattle city limits. She had no idea where Tukwilla was, had never been there. So point being, whether it was pre-device based digital maps or today, most people have no idea where they are.