An uncanny driving experience

I’ve been driving in California for decades. As an Intel engineer I spent two years on relocation in Silicon Valley, and then flew in a few times a year for over 20 years. But last month I was in Santa Clara and decided to visit a friend who had moved to the central valley, an area I’ve never visited before, some 4 hours’ drive south-east of the San Jose.

And unlike all my previous visits to the golden state, this time I used Waze. It worked beautifully, as always, without any need to adjust anything to America. It got me where I was going with the deftness of a guide dog guiding a blind man. Great!

But I had a strange feeling during this trip, and it took me a while to figure why. You see, this was the first time I’ve taken a long drive in the USA without using a map – a paper map, that is, either an AAA map or one by Rand McNally. And there are key differences between the map and the app:

• The map shows you your path in two dimensions (actually in Israel the better ones are topographic and show height data as well, but I can do with two). When you use a map you know where you are on the landscape; you are always aware which compass bearing you’re on, what is around you, and what you can expect to see next. Waze operates notionally on a one-dimensional path – a line from origin to destination. It tells you where to turn, but you are oblivious of directions and spatial relationships, and have no idea what is beyond the hills around you. For example, when I topped a hill and saw a large artificial lake I had no anticipation that it was coming and no idea what is was called.
• With a map you know at any time how far you are from your destination and also how far you’ve come from your origin; Waze pushes the road behind into oblivion, and you only see how far you still need to go (and that only as the odometer sees it). The sense of past progress and accomplishment isn’t there. A map tells you “You’ve covered 80% of the way!”; Waze says “10 miles to go, ETA 14:45”.
• With a map the towns you drive through have names, an extent (not just along the road), and suburbs. They have named rivers going through them. They have a reality. In a Waze-guided trip a town is just a nameless sequence of right and left turns,

You get the idea. And because I am used to maps, I was missing all this additional knowledge, and was feeling an uncanny sense of disorientation even while I was being taken straight to my destination. (Of course I use Waze almost daily in Israel, but having driven there for decades, and given its small area, I know the land by heart; I use Waze to navigate city streets faster and avoid congested roads, but my sense of spatial orientation is just fine. Not so in new parts of America).

And then it hit me: for the first time in my life, I was driving like a millennial! Except that a millennial would not feel disoriented, because they haven’t been spoiled by a lifetime of using the other method.

So is this a problem?

Well – the world has bigger problems right now, but this matter still merits a look. The ubiquity of GPS-equipped smartphones, coupled with applications like Waze, Google maps, and Moovit, has certainly revolutionized the way we get around on our home planet. Wherever you are, all you have to do it input your destination, and the app gives you turn by turn driving directions that are reliable and take into account real-time traffic data. Great!

These apps are free, but they do carry a hidden cost. A study done by Dan Simchi at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Jaffa has shown that when you use them a lot you lose your sense of spatial orientation: heavy users are unable to tell which way they’ve driven to get to here, and if deprived of the app are less capable of finding their way back. They are also unable to drive again on the same path without the app, and are generally less aware of their geographic environment.

So yes, this is to some extent a problem. On the other hand, it is similar to young people today not knowing how to do sums in their head – the arrival of electronic calculators did away with that. It can be argued that we don’t need to teach the multiplication table to our children when calculators (or the apps that are replacing them) are always available.

And yet, there is a difference: losing the ability to do sums may be harmless in this day and age; but losing one’s spatial orientation skills can lead to trouble – people at times end up very far from where they thought they wanted to go because they blindly trusted the app when it made a mistake (apps may not be human, but they do err). A map user would sense that they’re in a wrong area of the country by looking around and seeing the dissonance relative to the map. To use a map you need a higher level of awareness and mental engagement than that required to follow turn directions. And the app also robs young people (unless they’re into hiking) of the knowledge of their home country, compressing all its beauty and complexity into a set of linear road trips. I’m somehow not sure we want to lose that.

Oh well…