Do I? No.
Should I? No. You should do what makes the most intuitive sense for you.
Some people find it easier to picture the map as a fixed objective representation of the land. I’m not going forward, I’m going south. Some people find it easier to picture the map as something relative to themselves. I’m always going forward, regardless of whether it’s north, east, south, or west.
Neither is necessarily better than the other.
We have clearly had very different experiences. I see that the iPhone app does do that.
I just did a Google image search for “GPS”, and the vast majority of the images show the direction of travel as up. There are certainly a few that show the map in north-up configuration (and, presumably, a few of the others actually have cars driving north). Looking at the websites of Tomtom and Garmin, two big independent GPS makers, they both show images of direction-of-travel-up.
To clarify, I’m talking about the turn-by-turn use of the GPS. There’s usually a way to view the whole route, which uses the standard north-up view. But once you get to making individual turns, they usually default to direction-of-travel-up.
That’s probably due to the fact that, using the turn-by-turn at street level, there is only one possible way to view it. We’re talking here about using maps, which would equate to an overhead GPS view.
In my experience: Turn by turn GPSs predominantly used for cars will have the direction of travel as up, and speak in lefts and rights. Handheld GPSs used in the outdoors will have true north as up. Both will usually have an option for switching back and forth depending on preference.
As for orienteering:
Invest in a good compass like a Silva Ranger
Set the correct declination for your area
Place the compass on the map, using the side of the compass as a straight edge connecting the place you are with the place you want to be.
Twist the dial in the middle until the four little straight lines in the dial, line up true north and south. The compass is made of clear plastic to help you.
Depending on how you turned the dial your compass will now point to where you want to go or the exact opposite of where you want to go, use your common sense.
You can do this in you tent in the morning, or at night, or huddled under a rain coat. The map can be facing any direction, you don’t have to be able to see the ground, or pick out mountains.
If the globe had streets visible on it and I had a bunch of “turn left, turn right” directions, I might.
I can change it on mine. I tried it both ways on mine. I found up is the direction of travel is more useful, since when you are just glancing at the screen, you don’t have time to figure which way your little dot is going on the screen.
Actually, I wish there was a mode where the current location was close to the bottom of the screen, instead of the center, so I could see more upcoming streets.
For those of you who can mentally rotate a map (myself included) have you ever been able to mentally rotate your environment?
For instance since all movie theatres look pretty much the same inside can you be sitting in one facing south and then mentally rotate the space so you’re facing north?
It’s an odd concept and hard to understand (and explain) but it’s something I’ve been able to do since I can remember. It’s led to being able to rotate mentally any environment I’m in in 90 degree increments.
I can’t even read a map. If I don’t have my GPS, I just stay home. (Okay, I could probably read one if I had to, but It feels so icky and low-tech, and anyway I don’t have to). Map-reading, like writing in cursive or changing your own oil, is not a valuable skill for the average suburbanite anymore. There is a cost-effective technological replacement for map-reading, and there are cost-effective oil-changers and calligraphers when the need for those services arises.
I have a feeling this sentiment (ew, maps!) is going to become more and more predominant the younger someone is. It’s the future now, baby.
This is what I hate about my GPS. I should have the option of orienting the map so that “north” is “up.”
That’s just kind of…pitiable. Are you unable to do math without a calculator, too?
I don’t understand why you need a map if you have directions. The map is used to figure out your directions. Once you know them, what good is looking at the map? You already know that, when you’ve gone about X miles, you look at the street signs until you find the one you are supposed to turn on. What does the map give you that the directions do not?
Directions often don’t tell you how far it is to the next street (Google maps does, people generally don’t), but even when they do they don’t tell you whether you should be looking for a side street or a collector or an arterial, whereas as maps do differentiate these types of roads.* In areas where signage is poor to non-existent and/or traffic is heavy, a map (and a navigator) is a great help. Maps will also help you find alternate routes, should you miss a turn or get detoured due to construction.
*A thing I often do with a map is look at the major streets before and after my turn so I can know when the turn is coming up and when I’ve gone too far.
Okay, first of all, this is one of those skills that video games give you when you’re 7, unless you’re playing one of those annoying games that rotates the map depending on where you’re facing. Second,…just get a GPS, there’s no point in beating around the bush about this, leave that poor bush alone, it’s done nothing to you! The map will never get updated, the sixteen Chinese-Mexicans watching your every move with that device will :)(no offense intended toward Mexicans, Chinese, or Chinese-Mexicans. If you say that line with Stephen Colbert’s voice it makes a ton more sense ;))
No matter what type of map it is, if North is not at the top it really throws me. Every time.
I don’t turn the map, maybe it has to do with the way I picture the situation.
I think of myself as hovering above the scene, and tracing my car’s path on the map. There’s no need to reorient the map, because I’m not moving, the teeny little car on the map is. Kind of like the map scenes in the Indiana Jones movies.
I do not look at it as me riding in the tiny car that is moving along the path on the map. If I did, then I might prefer to reorient.
For those of you who don’t rotate the map, in your internal map, is north always up?
I don’t need to rotate the map, it’s just easier and one less thing to think about when I’m navigating. When I’m picturing an area in my head, I’ll usually make the most important street horizontal - and since the grids in this city are kind of weird, north could be anywhere.
Yes, that’s just how I was taught.
I love maps and can entertain myself for hours with a standard state road map. Although google maps and GPS units have a place, they cannot replace the joy of a real, live map where I don’t have to zoom in/out, scroll, etc.
And yes my maps are always oriented north up. If I am travelling south, I have a picture in my head like the old movies of a little car being moved down the page. 
Yeah, mine is.
Funny, one of the few places I get disoriented is in shopping malls, probably because they don’t have any windows. I don’t know how anybody ever gets out of the Megamall (or why they go in, for that matter).
I don’t understand why you think either of those claims is true. You certainly could view turn-by-turn street level driving instructions with an overhead north-up map. The image would be a small map that showed a little arrow pointed wherever your car was headed, and it would still say things like “turn left/right” with the arrow on the map indicating where to go. I would argue that that’s not as easy or helpful as the way it currently works, just like looking at a map without turning it is not as easy or helpful when trying to figure out where to go. But that’s what the thread is about.
I can’t quite figure out why “using maps” has to equate to an overhead GPS view. Why couldn’t it be any part of using maps to find something? If you have a street-level map, and you’re using it to figure out where to turn next, that’s pretty much the same use case as the turn-by-turn GPS view, but with less flexible technology.