It’s not just for getting home, but for getting home as efficiently as possible without added stress.
The former has ~15 traffic lights vs the latter ~2.
Imho, one of the most corrosive aspects of GPS has been mystifying navigation, due to over reliance on weird street connections. Versus the conceptually simply (if slightly longer) routes we used to take.
Unfortunately, with the net effect that people who only use GPS think the art of manual street navigation is impossibly complex.
Shortly after 2010, that route became much less useful [due to heavily increased traffic] and when a colleague told me that I should try Waze, I realized that Waze was now sending a bunch of traffic down "my" route home.
This, exactly!
Many years ago I realized constant GPS use meant I had no idea how to get around the city I'd lived in for years, and had huge gaps in my knowledge of how it fit together.
To fix that, I:
1) ditched the GPS,
2) started using Google Maps printouts where I manually simplified its routes to maximize use of arterial roads, and
3) bought a city map as a backup in case I got lost (this was pre-smartphone).
It actually worked, and I finally learned how to get around.
"In front is always in front" deserves to die a fiery death.
People should damn well know how to orient on a map.
How? The problem is GPS routing takes you on all kinds of one-off shortcuts which are a poor framework for general navigation, and tend to lack repetition. It also relieves you of the need to think on the way from A to B.
> Not driving everywhere probably plays some part in that too.
I could see that as being helpful, but that's only really doable in a small area, like a city center. You're not going to learn a metro area that way.
I see a lot of people exiting when they see traffic come on and I can't help but shake my head. We've all tried it before, and it almost never works.
The value of Apple maps to me is if there's HUGE traffic - like an accident closing 3 lanes. Often there's no indication of this otherwise, and you can be stuck for a whole nother hour. But Maps knows, and it'll put you on a longer highway to get away from it.
I no longer use apple maps in my daily commute (1.5 hours one way). But, when I did, it caught quite a few huge accidents. Now I leave the office earlier and the likelihood of accidents is much lower, so I don't need Maps. Even so, once in a blue moon I'll be in a sticky situation.
We've outsourced that to an app, too.
Some of it simply wasn't possible before the technology came along.
I think "memorize" has the wrong connotation of rote memorization, like you were memorizing data from a table. I think it was more like being observant and learning from that.
> We've outsourced that to an app, too.
The technology lets you turn off your brain so it can atrophy.