My Garmin does great. I have two. One on my Storm, and a hiking unit with streets loaded. The hiker does not need cell towers. It actually will find my house. The Storm does too.
MapQuest or Google can’t find my house. I’m not talking bad directions, I don’t exist. I understand that, I’m in the ‘boonies’. I don’t expect every system to be able to find me.
I often just give a person a map that I draw. That never fails. But I also understand that I’ve been making maps professionally for 20 years. There are a lot of people that should never, ever put pencil to paper when it comes to drawing a map.
On that note, I do find the GPS to be a life saver when running around in towns with no grid system. My Wife is from Pittsburgh. Built on the 3 rivers with lots of tunnels and hills. GPS or a paper map is the only way I can get around. Verbal directions just don’t work. Miss one turn and you are on a bridge in a completely different part of town, and are really and truly screwed.
I’ve been in Pittsburgh with people that grew up there and they were lost. I found a map and they did not know where we where and only had a general idea of where to go. Towards the Zoo. If they could find the zoo, they could get home. North, South and East West means nothing to them.
You should have phoned in a tour of the city while you were at it. Think of how much fun you could have pulling up the various historical sites on the computer and reading the history of it over the phone.
I so hear you on this one.
I don’t know what compels someone to “take the word” of some bit of technology, be it a paper map or a GPS, over the word of somebody who’s lived there for 30 years.
We had this problem long before the advent of the internet and GPS units. The house I grew up in wasn’t actually on the street that its street address suggested it ought to be on. Let’s say the street address was 2 Jones Street. But the house was on the corner of Elm and Park. Jones Street forked off of Elm a little ways past my house.
You couldn’t find the house by the address even if you knew your way around. It was just an addressing peculiarity.
So we spent a lot of time saying things like, “The address is 2 Jones Street, but you won’t find it by looking for the street address. It’s on the corner of Elm and Park. It’s across from 31 Park. Yes, I know you have a map, but it won’t help you find the house. Yes yes, I know it sounds weird, but really, just go to 31 Park and it’s the house across the street. Yes, I know you know the neighborhood, but the house isn’t even on Jones Street. You won’t find it by looking for the address. Please just go to 31 Park!”
You can guess how often we had to go running down to where Jones Street split off of Elm Street and try to catch the guy sloowwwly cruising up and down looking for an address that didn’t exist.
It was such a relief to get someone on the phone who said “Oh yeah…I know the house you’re talking about. Across from 31 Park. Got it.”
I can only imagine how bad it must be for the people who live there now. They must spend a lot of time saying “Put 31 Park into your GPS or you’ll never find it. Look, just trust me, okay. Yes, I know you have Google Maps. If you want to use it, search on 31 Park, not 2 Jones. Please!” And I’ll bet they’re still running down Elm Street trying to catch the jackass with the GPS slooowwwwly cruising up and down looking for an address that doesn’t exist.
And note, none of the above involves actually giving directions, but just giving the person an (effective) address.
I can see why you wouldn’t always want to listen to someone’s long-winded and redundant directions, but if someone SPECIFICALLY TELLS YOU THAT YOUR GPS/MAP/INTERNET MAPPING SOFTWARE/VOICES IN YOUR HEAD WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO FIND THE ADDRESS, you really ought to listen to them.
Has anyone suggested otherwise? I think we all acknowledge that there are exceptions, and people should heed special instructions.
Most of the mapping systems give stupid directions.
Google maps often can’t generate directions from an intersection. I really don’t need directions on how to get to Colorado Springs, CO from Albuquerque, NM, but I would like to know how to get from I-25 to an address in the Springs.
I’ve seen Delorme S&A tell me to get onto I-40 the wrong way, go 3 miles to the next interchange, exit, cross over the interstate, and get back on going the right way.
None of the systems know about closed roads due to construction, etc, where someone giving directions probably will.
They often don’t realize that Pineridge Ave, Pineridge Crcl. and Pineridge Way are not at all the same.
They will also typically send you the shortest way, when there is another way that is 2 blocks farther but saves 6 stoplights.
I’ve also had them tell me to exit where there was no exit, go the wrong way on a one-way street, and go several blocks past the post office and U-turn, because the map didn’t know there was a cut in the median for a left turn.
Ahahaha. I was doing a road trip with some friends and we were in two separate vehicles. A family member works at the Canadian version of the AAA, so I asked her to make up some maps with directions and she gave me a huge package of precise instructions and we went over them before I left.
The other group? Just had a GPS.
Guess which group got all the calls from the other asking for proper directions? Uh huh.
Haven’t checked recently, but one time I tried to find the closest Fedex drop point to Fish Creek, Wisconsin. The web site said it was Menominee, Michigan, only 10 miles away.
Close, sure – across very wet and deep Green Bay. The driest route for a car would be about 150 miles, so no, Menominee wasn’t the closest drivable drop point, which was in Sturgeon Bay, about 15 miles.
Obviously the software programmer didn’t factor in significant obstacles.
I have the opposite problem.
I’m really not prepared to give directions to my house. I can get here…I’ve lived here 11+ years. But there are a couple tricky turns. The streets are all named the same thing and I still don’t track which is which. I’m one of those women who gets my left and right confused and drives by landmarks (turn left at the house that has the cute gazebo in the back yard). Yeah, you don’t want my directions. And, yeah, I know…I have other skills. One of my strengths is knowing my weaknesses.
And yet, my kid’s friend’s mothers have never apparently heard of Mapquest or Google Maps, because they always ask. Always.
(I should print them out and put them by the telephone. But then I’d probably become one of those people who the OP is complaining about).
A friend and I borrowed a GPS unit from her dad twice.
The first time it told us to take a right, then a left, then another left, then a right. We ended up 1/2 a mile down the same road we were on to begin with - and there was no reason we couldn’t have simply stayed on the road. No detour or anything.
The second time it told us to go down 3 one-way roads…the wrong way all three times. We didn’t, of course.
We don’t bother with it any more.
I, too, live in the boonies. Although I live only 3 miles off of a small highway, and can stay on paved roads from there to anywhere, Mapquest and Google Maps both give directions to, or from, here by going 12 miles on a dirt logging road that is only sporadically maintained in summer and NEVER plowed in the winter and therefore mostly unusable for 4-5 months of the year.
Give them a break! They aren’t interested in where you live. They’ve probably got a sheet of paper near the phone with directions on how to get there from highway exits in all directions, and that’s what they’re reading off of. When I was a teenager I used this cheat sheet, having no idea in the world how one might arrive at the Starlight Drive-In from a different part of town, or a different friggin’ city. Otherwise I’d have to go find someone who did know about roads and exits and by the time I got back the irate caller would have long ago hung up in a rage.
that was an anecdote from back in the day.
I don’t drive out of town, and I’d use AAA or mapquest for that. For tooling around town now, I have a City Atlas, with big maps of each part of the county and a cross reference list of streets in the back. Takes me an average of 3 minutes to find the proper street. If it is too new to be there, I’ll call and ASK FOR DIRECTIONS.
I have a .jpg of the area around my house that I can email folks. Admittedly, there are few roads but some major landmarks like the continental divide on a state highway. And a few towns. I’m two turns off the highway, so it works pretty well. God help you if you take lower 4 instead of upper 4 though. Had a concrete truck running out of time looking for my house once because he did not follow instructions. That’s when I started just making a map.
MapQuest and Google maps can’t find my house. My Garmin can. :shrug:.
I’ve decided that with more and more people getting GPS, more and more people are going to become functionally map and directionally impaired.
We just got back from driving around Netherlands, Belgium, and France. We brought a thick Michelin book of maps, a pocket map of Paris, and the Tom Tom One with updated maps. The trip definitely would not have gone as smooth with one and not the other. There was no way we would have found the abandoned abbey in Villers-La-Ville without the TomTom without constantly stopping and asking for directions. On the other hand, there were a couple times where we just didn’t trust the TomTom and followed the maps and let the GPS play catch up.
I agree with the OP. If you think they might need directions, just ask directly. Actually trying to communicate effectively can soothe quite a lot of problems.
Here’s what I don’t like about directions. I’m not going to remember whether I was supposed to turn left or right two blocks after the McDonalds across from the gas station. Or was it three? I’ll end up not getting to where I want to be, and what’s worse I won’t even know where I want to be. Because you gave me directions when I asked for your address.
But if you’ll tell me what your address is and I can look at a map, I’ve got a picture in my head of where I’m supposed to go and even if I miss my turn I can probably find my way via an alternate route. Any little tidbits you might want to throw in about the best way to get there are fine, but please tell me where you actually are. That way when if I should get hopelessly lost, I can at least ask for directions at a gas station or something.
I think part of the issue is that there are two radically different ways that people navigate, and people falling into opposite categories rarely give each other useful navigational advice. The ‘map in your head’ types like me don’t keep track of landmarks much, and usually think about turns as being north/south/etc rather than left or right. The ‘go from one landmark to the next’ types don’t keep track of the names of streets and have no idea which way east is, but can give a long litany of information about what you’ll see as you follow their route and which direction you should go relative to your last direction. Information that helps the first type is useless to the second, and information that helps the second type is useless to the first.
A lot of people, usually older ones, are still stuck in their old habits. My wife, who is a few years older, still uses phone books and dials 411 for directory assistance, even when she’s on her computer and could just Google it. OTOH she does get driving directions from the Web.
As an unrelated aside, I was once walking in Venice, California–well actually, I ended up walking right through it–and was dismayed to notice that Verizon Navigator had everything backwards, you know, right turns instead of lefts and so on. I think it must have something to do with the 1- and 2-digit house numbers in the last block before the Boardwalk, AFAIK unique in the City of L.A. of which Venice forms a part.
People do this all the time; I ask for their address, and instead of telling me like a normal person, they just start giving me directions on how to get there! Uhm, NO I asked for your street address, not how to get there! And where is “there” anyways? How do I know if I’m going the right way if all you tell me is to “turn left at the store where I bought that green sweater that one time”.
Now there was ONE time a guy was adamant that both google maps and mapquest would give improper directions to his house. He wasn’t way out in the middle of nowhere, it was a house in a subdivision. I took his address and his directions anyways, and tried google maps. Sure enough, he was right, google maps said to go two blocks past his house.
And another thing, I wanna know what city planner jackass decided it was a great idea to put 84th PL, 84th Ave, and 84th St all right next to each other and with the same numbering conventions on the houses. I have to tell people ‘the house number is this, but make sure you’re on 84 AVE. A VEN OOO.’ And of course the house on 84th St with my same number is the same color as mine so I can’t even say “Look for the yellow house”.