I always tell people specifically to NOT use GPS or mapquest to get to my home. The directions provided on either of those will include streets that exist only on paper and in the little electronic brains of the GPS or mapping software. People who insist otherwise will be calling later on from the other part of our street – the part that’s interrupted by a dead-end and a stream, or from a nearby road that only in theory connects with our neighborhood.
No.
The routes I referenced were in metropolitan areas. No “boonies” involved, just some ideosyncratic urban planning.
Because it’s courteous and because you can give actual useful landmarks. Not everyone has GPS, and it has a bad habit of pointing out a slow, second-rate route as opposed to a faster one.
Heh. Last winter we swapped houses with friends in LA. If we had listened to the GPS going home, we would have gone on 5 over the Grapevine - which happened to be closed. We knew enough to use 101 (sorry the 101) which while slightly longer in miles to get to the Bay Area beats 5 in terms of driving time.
Going there we foolishly decided to trust the GPS and not the directions. We wound up on twisty turny roads, all alike, instead of smooth sailing on the way we were told, which was a little bit longer but much easier.
When I got my GPS, I used to enjoy putting in an address and following the brain dead directions it gave. Sometimes it taught me a cool new way to get someplace, but mostly the directions were totally insensitive to traffic conditions.
I’ll always take directions over the GPS, with the GPS as backup if I get lost. And I’m a big fan of real maps also, ones that work even if you get off the grid of the map Yahoo or Google give you.
because its 2009, and maybe 1/5 or less of cars have GPS in them, not everyone has a smartphone with mapping software on it, and if I’m not at home, I don’t have internet.
And believe it or not, plenty of people don’t even have a PC at home, yet alone an internet connection.
MORTY: Stay on 95 South to Biscayne Boulevard. Then you make a left turn. Put you blinker on immediately, there’s an abutment there. Then you’re gonna merge over very quickly, but stay on Biscayne. Don’t get off Biscayne. You understand me?
JERRY: Stay on Biscayne.
I usually offer to give directions if someone asks for my address, and since I know that a nearby intersection has recently changed to not allow left turns anymore and that that happens to be the directions Google usually gives, I explain that they’ll have to go around another way depending on where they are coming from. The cops have been camping out in front of my house specifically to catch people making that left-hand turn.
GPS and the Internet are great tools, and are useful to supplement an address, but I can’t imagine disliking social interaction enough to actually get annoyed at someone offering to help me out by giving directions. I can, however, get annoyed at those that are unable to give useful directions!
Ah. You have one of those as well? 
I have to give ‘special directions’ for people coming to my place no matter how they arrive. If they’re driving, it’s out of the way near a river that disrupts the street grid, and the freeway has two half-exits separated by aboiut four kilometres with highly non-obvious routing. If you take the bus or streetcar, your transfer stop varies depending on which route you’re on… even among different routes using the same piece of road. Honestly, the bicycle routing is the easiest to describe.
Actually, I just tried Google Maps’ driving directions to my place, and they got them pretty much bang on!
If I took Mapquest or Google map’s recommendations for my daily work commute, I’d drive about 30 miles more each way than I actually have to.
Those programs can suggest routes, but they don’t show much actual driver-style intelligence in choosing which one to take.
The rant, as stated, is correct. I’ve run into the same thing. If someone asks for an address, give an address. If someone asks for directions give them the address and the additional information needed.
I’ll take it a step further and suggest that when giving the address, include the zip code. I’ve had many problems (with a GPS) looking up information by city when a location is between 2 cities. If I start with the zip code then I don’t have any problems. Zip codes are also easier to type in than some 20 character name I’ve never heard of.
Mapquest works for me pretty much all the time, but I never look at the directions – I just look at the location on the map and figure out what route will work best. Following Mapquest directions to my house will add 15 minutes to your ride.
My problem with people who give directions is that most of them are terrible at it. They don’t know the names of the streets in their own neighborhood. They say ‘right’ when they mean ‘left’. They tell you every stupid landmark along the way except the one where you need to turn. They don’t mention the street you need to turn at is at a stop sign. And so on.
On vacation last week I asked a shop owner for directions to a local high-profile attraction. Go up the street and turn left on Main, got it. After that, I was treated to a dissertation on every building on Main Street for the next 12 blocks–'this is a good place to eat, that’s some sort of karaoke church*, the white building used to be red before they painted it, yak yak yak". Truly, all I needed was, North on Route 21, a few miles, you’ll see it on the right."
*actual phrased used
I tend to give people driving directions to my house for one of two reasons:
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The default GPS directions are great as long as you’re not driving through rush hour, but from 7:30am-9:30am and 4pm-7pm on the average weekday, blindly following your GPS means an extra hour of bumper-to-bumper insanity at 20kph. I usually let people know about the alternative route just in case.
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Based on our address, you’d like we like on Tiny One-Way Cres - GoogleMaps and GPS will even tell you we’re smack-dab in the middle bend of Tiny One-Way Cres if you type in the address.
In reality, we’re on the corner of Tiny One-Way Cres and Rather Busy St, and the door is on the Rather Busy St side of the house. Nine times out of ten, the delivery guys totally ignore those instructions and ring the neighbours’ doorbell or frantically call us trying to figure out why they can’t find our door.
Which wouldn’t be a problem if people were willing to listen when you give friggin’ directions rather than blindly following their GPS as if it was Christ Incarnate leading the way to salvation.
Besides, I’ve seen GoogleMaps send people on weird roundabout routes just for the heck of it. For example, there’s a perfectly good highway-only route to get to my employer’s suburban office - GoogleMaps, for some bizarre reason, insists that you get off the highway several exits earlier than you need to and continue along a side road instead.
GoogleMaps and GPS are merely tools. So is anyone who follows them blindly without questioning why they’re taking that route.
I give limited directions to my office, because online map services, GPS, and blind navigation invariably result in people doing a fruitless orbit for about twenty minutes, and this sets their initial state to “angry and frustrated” for our meetings. If I can avoid that by saying “You need to approach from the south on X, and turn right at the second driveway after you cross Y,” then I’m willing to risk offending them by implying that they are too old or feeble to manage the internets, or too poor to afford a GPS unit. 
Google Maps provides directions that are likely to get you killed, or even fined.
Heh. Not as bad as the driving directions from New York to Paris that included “swim the Atlantic Ocean”…
I’m a geocacher, so I know from GPS units. And I know their limitations. Humans are smarter. True, GPS units have liberated us from people who can’t give coherent directions, or give them in the form of their life story. But nothing is better than a human who knows their way around a place as part of their daily routine, so why wouldn’t you listen to them?
I assume you’ve heard the saying that a guy with two clocks never knows what time it is. A few months back we were trying to navigate the Boston outskirts with two gps units (my 60csx handheld and a crappy dashboard unit) that firmly disagreed on the best way to go. We finally got there, thanks to my reading an old fashioned map.
Heck, I’ve lived in Chicago all my life, and Chicago has a logical grid system, but people will still give me directions on how to get somewhere.
I once tried to get driving directions from one of my university’s campuses to another, both in the NYC metro area. Googlemaps had me drive to Iowa and back (a 2000-mile round trip) to get someplace that was about 20 miles away.
Just sayin’. I’m with the OP otherwise.
Here’s why I do it: The last three people that were coming here for the first time and ignored my simple directions (two turns, one off of a U.S. highway and the second into my driveway) became lost.
This in spite of me warning them that their GPS, Magellan, WTF ever would be worse than useless out here, they would be sent the wrong way and they would be put in an area without cell phone service. Still, no, these dumb fucks just HAD to prove to me that people that travel these roads every day don’t know as much as Mapquest or some similar joke.
One of them ran out of gas and I had to take a can to him, after he knocked on a friendly farmer’s door and borrowed the land-line. The other two had to drive back 20+ miles and start over, this time following my (did I say simple?)directions.
So if you’re coming to see me, either follow my instructions or depend on the cyber-crap and be prepared to drive 40+extra miles and eat some peanut butter sandwiches if you had the foresight to pack some. It’ll take you at least a couple of extra hours to get here, if you listen to the intarwebs.
Yes! My parents have been online for years, but their method of finding my new place involves:
- drive to my city
- call me while circling and describing landmarks fully expecting that I know the exact route to my place from each gas station, park with swings, or sort of brown apartment complex
Google the fucking address! It is not one of the untraceable exceptions listed in this thread, and I know for a fact that it will get you right to my front door because that’s how I found it the first place after seeing the ad in the paper.
I pass the phone off to my patient wife.
Oh, and if you think this is hyperbole, they once drove around for over an hour, calling intermittently when they became lost with our over-the-phone-on-the-fly directions. I had to force them to just stop the car, goddamn it, and drive out to them.