Paper Route

Modern map apps are better than maps, except when they aren't

Personal navigation is evolving very quickly. We had paper maps in the dusky yesterdays of the 20th century. Most of us abandoned paper road maps for car manufacturers’ pricey dashboard GPS nav systems. Then we abandoned those systems for GPS-based apps on our smartphones. Now, we’re getting used to cars whose dashboards will mind-meld wirelessly with our smartphone map app. We’re so much better at not getting lost, but I believe we also are getting worse and worse at understanding where we are.

I do love the new tech. Who wouldn’t? Still, there are things about old-school maps I miss. Paper maps don’t need a charger cable; they don’t run out of battery. Paper maps don’t need cell service. They work just as well in sub-level three of a parking garage, or in the vast empty spaces of the American west, as they do downtown. Most importantly, paper maps also show us much more of the acreage around us than a smartphone nav screen will.

One downside to paper is that paper is not backlit! So you need light to see a paper map. For readers under 30: That is why the little lights above your driver’s seat and passenger seat are called “map lights.”

(This post was offered initially to paid subscribers to Thoughtful Enough. If you’re reading it later, once it has become available to free subscribers, I’m glad you are enjoying it and hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Thanks! Back to maps… -JG)

The maps we bought when filling up the gas tank at a Shell or Texaco station might encompass a broad area. You’d get a map for the northeastern United States, and it would unfold to show Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. There were pale blue lakes and rivers; pastel green parks and forests; color-coded major and minor highways; and big and little dots for cities and towns.

Many people kept a whole-country map book like the Rand McNally Road Atlas in the setback pocket. Alabama through Wyoming! Most states were displayed on their own pages. Texas and Alaska needed more than one page each. New Hampshire and Vermont might share a page because they fit together like two pizza slices nesting with one point-up and the other point-down. Delaware usually snuggled with Maryland; Rhode Island spooned with Connecticut.

My favorite paper maps were local-area street maps published by Hagstrom (for the New York area) or by ADC (for the mid-Atlantic). Their beautifully designed maps were scaled to show all the local streets, so it took a dozen pages to map out my town and the towns next door. Washington, DC-area drivers used to be able to buy a spiral-bound ADC book with maps for DC and all its neighboring counties in Maryland and Virginia. It was excellent for finding my way to the house of some new friend, or to a stadium for a ball game. I could use that map in the comfort of my driver’s seat before I started the car. If I were picking up a friend at National Airport, I’d see in advance how the exit from the southbound George Washington Memorial Parkway was going to meander toward the arrivals area.

Could you read your paper map while you were driving? Hell no! Not safely. If you were alone, you had to pull over and look at the map, then get back on the road. If you had other people in your car, you enlisted a passenger to follow the map and give you a heads-up about turns. People who have only known modern smartphone nav systems have no idea how fiercely emotions would flare between driver and passenger when an exit was missed. Smartphone users who miss an exit just hear, “Make a u-turn when possible.” There’s no anger, no bitterness. There’s no cursing!!! There’s no stony silence for 15 minutes afterward. There’s no awkward pause, two days later, when your friends ask you, “Hey, I hear you and Marianne broke up. What happened?”

Annoyances: Maps go out of date, so you bought new ones every few years. Paper road maps were famously difficult to re-fold along the proper creases after they were opened up.

Jeopardy: A spilled cup of hot Dunkin coffee is Kryptonite for a paper map and for a smartphone, too.

I began this by saying our smartphones are making us worse at understanding where we are. Here’s why. With a paper map, you had to use your brain to answer a vital question: Where are you on this map right now? Then you had to use your brain to find the place you wanted to be on the map. Then your brain and your index finger chose your route, considering and rejecting alternatives, taking note of highway junctions, adding up the miles mentally, and envisioning your progress to your destination. You learned the relationships among key points on the map.

When you use a smartphone travel app, it does all that thinking for you. It knows where you are. It finds your destination. It plans your route. As you travel, it shows you only what is quite close alongside your route. You just follow the line on the screen, and you listen to the voice, and you know, to the minute, when you will arrive. That is a technological marvel. It is amazing; it is fabulous! But you don’t understand as much as earlier travelers would have understood about the surrounding world, the land you are traversing, where you’ve been and where you are and where you are going.

If you get philosophical about the value of your travels, you probably would like William Least Heat-Moon’s "Blue Highways" or Robert M. Pirsig’s "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".