An upward north is arbitrary, whereas up as an analog of forward is not.
I don’t even like my maps north-up. I rotate them so up is the direction I am facing. (I have a terrible sense of direction.)
I’d like to see a gender split on this question.
Most people I know have it pointed in the first option (map rotated from perspective of driver). I personally do not like this, as it screws up my sense of direction and place. With a fixed orientation of north pointed upward, I always know in which direction I’m going, and can better visualize where I am on a map and where I need to go.
Are there terms for these two types or ways of direction and location sense–visualizing oneself as a point within a fixed frame of reference, and visualizing the terrain as relative one’s own position?
I haven’t used a GPS in a car but I’ve used both heading oriented and north oriented navigation displays. The north oriented one was ground stabilised so the symbol representing you moved across the display and you had to reposition it from time to time so you didn’t go off the screen. I didn’t find either to be counter intuitive but if I had a choice I’d go for heading oriented.
There’s no reason to orientate a map to north either, for some people it might make more sense but other people might like to have their current heading to the top.
It’s “track up” if your track, the direction you’re heading, is up, IIRC. “Bearing up” is having the direction toward your goal up.
I leave the car GPS on “track up”, but sometimes when trying to reconcile things with a map, especially a memorized one or one that for some reason can’t be turned (like one attached to the car), might use north up.
Older GPS units that are very slow and jerky at rotating the image are easier to use North up.
I hate north up, even on Google maps. I live north of the city, so anywhere I need to go is usually south. Trying to figure out whether I’m going to be turning left or right when the map is upside down is a mess. Google maps has a new feature where you can rotate the map to your own orientation, which is much more helpful.
It’s people like you that can drive to the same place over and over and over and still have no idea where they are. If North isn’t on top, how am I supposed to know when I’m traveling West and when I’m traveling South? And if I don’t know that, how am I supposed to know which net direction I’ve traveled?
People like my GF drive with forward-up. When we’re at parties and someone says “I had to drive all the way from Chantilly to Vienna”, she gets this blank look on her face even though we’ve been there multiple times. It’s people like that that call me to get me to navigate them around a traffic jam or construction project because despite making that commute every day, they can’t even guess which direction home is in.
Putting “forward” on top is a handicap for people that are bad with navigation.
I keep my Garmin travel-up. There is a compass in the corner of the screen that tells me what direction I’m going. I use the 3D mode and I most often use it so I can see the names of the cross streets I’m approaching. It’s helpful at night when it’s not easy to read the street signs or if the street signs are missing.
If I need to zoom out and look at the map for the big picture, I tap the screen and it shows the map with north-up.
I very rarely punch in an address and have it take me step-by-step to a location unless it’s in a totally unfamiliar place or if I need an ETA on a long trip. When I first got the GPS I used the step-by-step a lot just to figure out the shortest routes to places I go a lot. In most cases, I didn’t need to change my regular route, but some of the suggested routes surprised me and turned out to be a lot quicker.
With a compass? My GPS can tell me which way north is, and which way I’m headed, regardless of the map’s orientation. Many vehicles have this built-in anyway, GPS or not.
She has a GPS and still needs to ask for directions?
People who do navigation as a job historically have heading oriented navigation displays. If you are good at navigation you don’t need a north oriented display to know that you’re travelling west.
It’s people like you that can drive into the sun late in the day and still be mystified as to their direction.
West, I’ll bet. Consult an astronomy text for further details.
Hah! That’s so wrong, it’s laughable. No, people that have the map spin around are the ones that don’t know where the sun sets, because they don’t care which way they’re headed.
I don’t get how it’s possible to screw up which way to turn. If the arrow is pointing down, then “left” is on the right. How hard is that? I’m always driving on the left side of the arrow. The turn is either “toward me” or “away from me”. Any turn that’s clockwise is a right turn and counter-clockwise is left.
Pilot, aerial mapper, plotter operator, pipeline patrol and so old I remember using radio ranges.
When it all goes sideways and since we can’t pull over and figure it out, it is necessary to survival to be able to use a map in any direction bit usually, since they are very big and we have such a small space to work with, you do not flip them around a lot.
No days I have run into private pilots that can not find their way without a GPS display and they had to be able to use a map to get the license but they don’t ever do it again and only rely on the high tech.
I am so glad I am not map challenged. I could never trust myself to just that GPS tech totally. I have had too many things quit at exactly the wrong time.
I love what GPS can do but I never use the voice nor let it tell me what to do.