A few thoughts on using a GPS when traveling away from home.

For many of us, our smartphones are the last thing we look at before going to sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking. We use them to meet people, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and to find our way around.

We rely on them to document the places we go. we count on them to guide us thru unknown streets and to take us to our destination especially when we travel outside of our neighborhoods.

The smartphone supplanted the cherished navigation knowledge, the art of handling paper maps within the city and out on the road. It also transformed our daily experiences when navigating a city or when working on reaching one either by car, by foot or by bicycle,etc. ; depriving us of some urban gestures and practices like steeping into the street to raise a hand for a cab or stopping by to ask for directions.

It isn’t particularly helpful to ask whether this new everyday life is ‘better’ or ‘worse.’ ”; I very much doubt we’d have permitted the smartphone to supplant so many other objects and rituals in our lives if we didn’t, on balance, perceive some concrete advantage in doing so. But there are a few circumstances that arise as a result of this choice that we might want to take careful note of:  the manufacturer of our devices, the developers of the apps, the shadowy hackers, the ability to stay permanently connected to the networks.

Those elements imply that our ability to perform the everyday competently is now contingent on the widest range of obscure factors—things we’d simply never needed to worry about before, things that go from the properties of the electromagnetic spectrum and our moment-to-moment ability to connect to the network to the stability of the software we’re using.

Thanks to its Assisted GPS chip—and, of course, the quarter trillion-dollar constellation of GPS satellites in their orbits twenty million meters above the Earth—the smartphone knows where it is “at all times”. This mechanic sense of place is further refined by the operation of a magnetometer and a three-axis microelectromechanical accelerometer: a compass and gyroscope that together allow the device to register the bearer’s location, orientation and inclination to a very high degree of precision.

That function lead us to think of the GPS function (either the one available on a smartphone or a standalone one) as one that makes it indispensable: the ability it grants us to locate ourselves, to follow our movements in real time and therefore to guide us to wherever we wish to go is essential.

In using it to navigate, we become reliant on access to a network; we are giving ourselves over to a way of knowing the world that relies completely on real-time access; we find ourselves at the mercy of something more contingent, more fallible and far more complicated than any paper map. Consider what happens when someone in motion loses their connection to the network, even briefly: lose connectivity even for the time it takes to move a few meters, and they may well find that they have been reduced to a blue dot traversing a featureless field of grey. At such moments, we come face to face with a fact we generally overlook, and may even prefer to ignore: the performance of everyday life as mediated by the smartphone depends on a vast and elaborate infrastructure that is ordinarily invisible to a lot of us.

So what happens when we trust this service and the software or the satellites or the magnetometer are not accurate? Or/and when the signal is not strong enough to connect to the network?

I had to face that situation more than once on a family trip that I took abroad.  I became comfortable using the car GPS and even more knowing that in any case, as a backup, I could use either one of the two different navigation applications  I had installed on my smartphone.

On the first occasion, on a rainy afternoon, we used our car GPS to reach our destination, a small town by a beautiful lake in Italy.  On our way there, I have corroborated the car GPS directions with the instructions I have gathered using the GPS application from my phone.

When we arrived,we walked thru the town, had dinner and as it got dark we decided to drive back to the place we were staying at.  We turned on the GPS for directions and started our drive.  Soon we found ourselves going on an endless loop through  the town.  We decided to get off the loop, park the car, re-enter the address in the GPS and start all over again.  That time the car GPS guided us to a “fast” route, the only thing is that it was thru the lake!  It literally put us on the road/entrance to the lake dedicated for ferries, boats and etc.  We were literally within feet from getting into the water.  The map that appeared on the screen (too bad I was too worried to take the picture at the time) showed a straight line thru the lake.  We interpreted that as perhaps being the existence of a tunnel or so; but that was not the case.  We got out as we could from the lake ramp. I decide to put in motion my back up plan:  the trusted software I had on my smartphone.  Surprisingly, the application also gave us directions to cross the lake, directly navigating on the water.

To make the story short, we had to rely on our memories to navigate back to the hotel in the nearby city we were staying at.

On the second occasion, we were traveling at night thru the mountains, on very narrow roads and with only the car lights guiding the way.  The GPS in repeated occasions commanded us to make sharp lefts or sharp rights where there were no roads, and the only thing in the given direction was the abysm. On addition to that, the GPS lost signal on various occasions; when it got the signal back, it repositioned itself on the wrong place. It started giving directions out-of-time and out-of-geographic location.  A 3 ½ hours trip ended up taking us, 8 hours, this is after finally being rescued by our hosts at around 2 a.m.

As we continued our trip thru unknown territories, I found out that in more than one occasion the GPS took us to a route that was not the quickest one although the settings had “fastest route” selected.

After doing some research, I learned that in fact regardless of the settings, in many occasions the route chosen by the GPS software will drive us to make more mistakes and to take longer to reach our destinations.

Having learned our lesson, we opted out to buy maps before continuing our trip. Locating a store selling physical maps proved to be a trip on itself, and yes, we had to rely on google maps to locate a bookstore that carried them 😉

With a map on hand we tested our ability to beat the GPS directions.   We set the address on the device (both the car device and the smartphone one).  The device provided us with the number of expected miles to cover and the time that would take us to arrive to the given place.  Our findings surprised us! We ended up getting there a lot faster on 2 out of 3 occasions.  We even had another car to join us in our test, just to play with other elements like traffic etc., but the results were consistent.

I decided to perform the test using our feet as a transportation mode.  This time the route we choose on the map was a straight win.  The GPS had us going up and down streets without any clear logic.  We literally reached the place in half of the time and the distance covered was also almost half.

My take away from these experiences is that:

• The GPS and the smartphones have transformed our lives in many ways, a lot of them quite positive. The GPS software allowed us to feel more comfortable about visiting places and cities that we otherwise felt hesitant about going to. But on the same token, the human sense of direction is fast degenerating as a result of our dependency on that technology.
• Our reliability on Smartphones and GPS software is affecting our ability to commit to human memory important things like places, landmarks and directions
• Unless we do something to balance digital tools (hardware and software) with acquired knowledge, we may become geographic illiterate and dissipate our sense of direction.
• Kids and adults in this digital era need to learn spatial reasoning skills to better make sense of the geographic world we live in. Most people are unable to navigate a road using a physical map. They are unable to read it and make a good interpretation of it.
• When traveling do keep a physical copy of a road map, the same way you carry a first aid kit: you never know when you’d need it!

I bet you have a few stories of good and bad situations revolving around the use of the GPS.  I would love to hear about them.  In the meantime I am trying to figure out on a map, the location of  the next town to visit.

 

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