S2E16 - You Are Here

Do you remember when "I think we missed the turn" caused a complete emotional spectrum of reaction? When the car would go quiet because someone had to admit they'd lost the page boundary on Thomas Guide map 347 and the next bit was on page 389?

So do we. There used to be a thing called knowing where you were. It lived in a spiral-bound atlas in the back seat, or in the head of whoever was driving. The Thomas Guide assumed you'd figure it out. The TripTik gave you only the path. GPS skipped past both and asks only that you keep the wheel pointed forward.

As usual, Renee and Marc travel through the past to see how that shaped today and where we're heading down the road. Maps, Thomas Bros, Mapquest, GPS...and some military satellites in there along the way.

If you have ever sworn at a Thomas Guide while driving in Los Angeles traffic, watched your phone confidently route you into a field, or forgotten which way is north in the city you've lived in for ten years, this one's for you. And if you're still that one person who knows the diagonal shortcut through the residential streets that gets you to the airport in twenty minutes, please hold that knowledge. It's getting rarer.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

The Thomas Guide Era

The Importance of Navigation

SPEAKER_01 0:00

There was a specific object that lived in the backseat of every car I had when I moved to California. And it was the Thomas Guide, right? Mark, if you grew up in Southern California anytime between 1950 and 2005, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It was a spiral-bound book about the size of a large Bible and roughly an inch and a half thick. At least the LA County one was. Orange County was not so big, and neither was San Diego, but the LA County one was big with a blue cover and a grid of colored maps inside that covered every street in Los Angeles County. And then some, right? And it weighed probably two pounds. It smelled like a, you know, particular combination of paper and ink. I can still smell it. And it was treated with reverence. Sam still has one. Oh, yeah. Even from like 1998, he still has it. And I only now understand was completely proportionate to how much you needed it. Like if you were gonna go anywhere in LA, and it got so bizarre at one point, people would just text you coordinates. They would tell you what page, right? And then what where in the grid? And they'd be like, you're going there. You'd be like, all right, I'll see ya. And then you'd look it up and then figure it out. The Thomas Guide. Do you remember the Thomas Guide?

SPEAKER_07 1:17

I remember the Thomas Guide. I had, and I think we eventually splurged for two because we would steal the Thomas Guide out of each other's cars. And uh and so for me, when I when we were first married, I was working in the field. And I'll talk about this a little bit later, but like you're driving around, had to have the Thomas Guide. So right.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

LA's big. I don't think people get how big LA County is. It is big. Yeah, something like 11,000 miles of surface streets or something crazy. Like it's it's gigantic. So yeah, that was the map for LA. So go ahead, tell us about it.

SPEAKER_07 2:24

Alright, so the Thomas Brothers maps. Mine was mine was a mine was a blue. I don't remember what color. It was like a peach or pinky or whatever, you know. But oh, and you know, those things are expensive too.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

But they can you can buy you can buy the 57th edition. It's uh it was last updated in 2024, and it's still$57 to buy it. Still.

SPEAKER_07 2:47

Yeah. I think it's handy though. Anyways, but so so Thomas Brothers was founded in 1915 in Oakland, California by George Coplin Thomas and his two brothers, the hence Thomas Brothers. Oh nice. There you go, yeah. And you know, people say the Thomas Guide, well, it's the Thomas Brothers Guide. Uh the company relocated its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1940. The first Los Angeles County Atlas uh appeared in 1946. By the mid-20th century, the Thomas Guide had become the definitive navigational reference for Southern California. And I don't think, I don't think anybody, like everybody that lived in Southern California pre-2000, right, they would definitely know the Thomas Guides, right? Yes. Yes. Used by delivery drivers, real estate agents, police officers. My dad had definitely used the Thomas Guide, ambulance dispatchers, and anyone who needed to find a specific address in a in a metropolitan area covering over 4,000 square miles with roughly 11,000 miles of road. There that's crazy. That's crazy. Updated annually, and people bought new additions the way you'd update software today.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yes, every year. I got one for Sam for Christmas. Like he got the new Thomas and he'd be so excited to get it.

SPEAKER_07 4:06

That's a good Christmas gift, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

All right. You'd be like, the new Thomas guide. And because you did you live in LA County when you were out to stay? That was LA County. That's LA County. Yeah, so if we were going down to like Orange County for whatever reason, like you'd buy an Orange County book. If you wanted to know how to get to anywhere in San Diego, you'd buy the San Diego book, right?

Skills and Challenges of Map Reading

SPEAKER_07 4:26

So you know, Los Angeles, you know, had it like you could like Disneyland was still in the LA County one, but it was just on the border, right? You know? So yeah, too far into the county, the other county border, and you know, no.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

And then yeah, it's gone. It's just gone. So the thing about the Thomas I think gets lost when you describe it to someone who's never used one, though, is how much skill it actually required. It wasn't a simple book. You couldn't just open it and find what you wanted. You started with the index, which was alphabetical by street name, and it gave you a page number and a grid coordinate. So you'd look it up and it'd be like lands down avenue, and you'd be like, okay, lands down. And you say, in this zip code, you'd be like, all right, it's on page 286, grid A24. Okay. So you had to remember all that and turn to page that page number, find A24. You'd be like, oh, here it is. And from there, you had to track it backwards, right? So it wasn't as easy as it's it as you thought. Then you found the page, you found the grid square, you found the street, and then you figured out how it connected to the next page over. So if your route crossed a page boundary, the page, like that was the enemy, man. Like once you were off that page, it would be like, go to page 286. You'd be like, oh my God, we're driving. Page 286, because it's a big block, right? And then I'm like, and then you got to find the road again on 286. Where is it on 280? Where is it? Where is it? It's right here. All right, keep going straight, hun. Like, that's what you did with this thing. It was crazy. You'd be navigating down the street in the lower left-hand corner, and it'd be like, you'd like continue on the next page, and you'd be have to flip to that page, reorient yourself. And you had to do it all before someone beeped at you. And when you called shotgun, you what you meant was, I guess I'll have the Thomas guide in my lap, right? Because you're the one who's gonna have to think you are the nav.

SPEAKER_07 6:16

You're the navigator. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Yes. That was the Thomas guide.

SPEAKER_07 6:20

Yeah. Well, try doing that when you're alone in the car and you're dil, you know, you're doing field work, right? So the page boundary problem is essentially an artifact of projecting a continuous geographic space onto a small or discrete set of rectangular pages. And the guide used a specific map projection and grid system that divided the coverage area into map pages with defined overlap zones on at the edges. So the streets near a boundary appeared on both adjacent pages. So it wasn't like a hard, you know, like a like a line and they cut the cut the map. There was a little bit of an overlap. But that overlap was limited in cross-page navigation, required maintaining kind of a spatial orientation across the transition, which is sort of a cognitive load, you know, while you're driving.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

And what you're describing technically is what I experienced emotionally as the moment that the car got quiet when someone said, I think we missed the turn. Yeah. Like you didn't even want to say it, right? Which is the pre-GPS era that had a very specific quality of dread. Because if you're on the freeway, you're like, oh, we missed that exit. Like you didn't know when the next exit was coming, like, oh, it's going to be terrible. We're up to get back on the other way. Then we got to get off and get back on the other way. Like, oh my God, it's such a yeah, yeah. That's why no one ever gave me the map. Not because you were genuinely lost, right? Because you had the Thomas guide and you could, you could eventually figure it out, but because figuring out required, you know, stopping, which required admitting you needed to stop, which triggered a set of interpersonal dynamics that I think fundamentally shaped an entire generation's relationship with navigation. The Thomas guide didn't just tell you where you were going, it told you something about who was in charge and was it they were willing to ask for help.

SPEAKER_07 8:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

It's it was a social object disguised as a reference book. Yeah, I was terrible at it. Poor Santa.

The Shift to GPS Technology

SPEAKER_07 8:17

I love that thing. The the the navigation technology transition from paper maps to GPS is like it's it's it's a completely behavioral substitution, uh, you know, in in consumer technology. With within roughly a decade, a skill set that adults had spent years developing became effectively unnecessary for most driving. I you know what? The only one of my kids that could even do this today is the one that's like obsessed with maps. The the other the other kids, they would they would be lost. Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yeah, I mean Sam loves a good map. God bless him. To this day, he loves a good map.

SPEAKER_07 9:00

I love maps, but you know, I grew up with maps and you know, grew up in the Boy Scouts and stuff. Right, exactly. So like you know how to use a compass. I know how to use a compass. Yeah, yeah the the skill though involved read with reading maps is you know you have to maintain that sort of spatial orientation, plan the routes, which I gotta tell you, this is the thing that I don't like about the Thomas Guide, is that it's a little hard to plan the route, especially in Los Angeles, you know, because you're going page to page. And if it's a long, it's a long you know, journey, page to page to page, like how do you know? And you know, sometimes people would highlight their maps and stuff, which I would just, you know, I I would never do that, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

You know, Sam would figure it out on paper, right? He would he would write down like, yeah, like this, like I'm going here, I'm gonna make a left here, I'm gonna do that. Yeah, he would have like what map quest ended up being one day, like that's what he would do before we left the house. Yeah, that way he didn't have to. Yeah, because I was so hopeless. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 10:01

Yeah, yeah. All of that, all of those skills, though, the implications of that, you know, that of that substitution for spatial cognition, for driving behavior, for what happens when the technology fails, right? Because sometimes the Thomas Guide isn't exactly correct, you know, and they're all they're sort of still being worked out there.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

So we're gonna trace the whole arc from the Thomas Guide through the first dashboard navigation systems to the satellite constellations that make it all of it possible, to the voice in your phone that has strong enough opinions about your route and occasionally sends you into a lake. Because the history of driving navigation is the history of our relationship with knowing where we are. And that turns out to be more complicated relationships than it sounds, especially if you're me.

SPEAKER_07 10:48

All right. So to understand what the guide, what Thomas Guide represented, or really any kind of local street map or atlas, right? You have to understand the navigational context that it comes out of. In the early 20th century, roadmaps are gas station giveaways produced by oil companies as a marketing tool. Have you ever seen some of these? I I yeah, I like oil company Chochkey. Uh do you know? Yeah, yeah. It's it has this whole attachment to the to the Southwest and Route 66 and you know, the the which what's the uh Sinclair? I love Sinclair and Phillips. You know, these are like, yeah, I just love some of these. The major oil companies, Shell, Standard, Gulf, they produce and distribute maps for free to encourage driving and fuel consumption. Like, of course, obviously. You know, and these maps are useful for intercity travel. So if I'm going from, you know, Barstow to Tucson or something like that. They tell you which highway to take between which cities. They're not useful for fine-grained urban navigation. Finding a specific address in a dense city with from a gas station giveaway map requires a degree of influence and local knowledge that the map itself just will never provide.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

They don't want you hanging around. They want you to get the hell out of town. Um The Thomas Brothers solve a specific problem for a specific geography. Los Angeles in the earliest 20th century is growing faster than any navigational transition can keep up with. New streets are being padded out and built constantly. The address system's not always intuitive, to say the fairly.

SPEAKER_05 12:30

Never intuitive.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Never intuitive. You should come out here. It's even crazier. Try to navigate a parking lot anywhere in Coachella Valley. It's crazy. The county's enormous. Newcomers are, and nearly everyone in Los Angeles in the 1920s and the 1930s were a newcomer, right?

SPEAKER_05 12:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Have no accumulated spatial knowledge of the area and no reliable way to develop it. The Thomas Guide gives you a complete, accurate, annually updated reference to the entire county street system in a single portable object for an automobile-dependent metropolitan area in a period of explosive growth. It's not a convenience at this point, right? It's an absolute necessity. You're not going anywhere, or at least you're not getting there anytime soon if you don't have a Thomas Guide.

SPEAKER_07 13:20

I think the Thomas Guide was great, but you know what was even better was having a dad that was a cop in Los Angeles. And because you know, you're talking about this sort of navigational system, and like, okay, my mom lives in the Salt Lake area, and Salt Lake City, the city itself, is so easy to get get around. Like there's no street names, that's all just numbers and north, south, east, west. So and it's a grid. Super simple, right? It's the whole Salt Lake Valley is laid out as a grid. So you know exactly where you are and where you need if you need to go over here. Well, that's three blocks this way and you know two blocks the the other way. And it's so it's so easy. Los Angeles is not like that at all.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Like I mean, go in the Hollywood Hills for seven minutes, you'll realize it's not like that.

SPEAKER_07 14:12

It's not like that at all. Like the geography is against you. You've got the Hollywood Hills, the Santa Monica Mountains, you've got the valley, you've got the Sepulveda Pass, you've got Mulholland, like all of these things, it's all working against you. And they all are these little tiny, you know, small eclectic burrows that start to connect, you know, in the 20s, 30s, 40s. You know, so so when I started to learn all of those systems and things, it was it was really helpful because my dad was like, oh, well, here in this area, the the major streets that run north-south are this, this, this, this. And you know that they're this, this, this, this because it's the names of the presidents. Lincoln, Washington, you know. Like people drive down Washington Boulevard and then don't realize that one block over is Lincoln and go, oh, Jefferson.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Like, is over here Jefferson and then Monroe and Madison.

SPEAKER_07 15:07

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like you, they don't like they, oh, wait a minute, you know, and the names of the presidents run, you know, this direction, north, south, or east-west. But, you know, every little kind of area in Los Angeles has these sort of unwritten rules, and you don't learn them, you know, and so the Thomas guide is there to help you with that. So making a comprehensive street atlas at that level of detail and accuracy before digital cartography, it's it's a huge sustained effort. Then the Thomas brothers employ field researchers who physically drive streets to verify their existence, their names, and their connectivity. Address ranges are researched and verified. The annual update cycle means that the field work is always happening. The new edition requires re-verifying every change to the road network since the previous edition. The production process is labor-intensive in ways that modern digital cartography is sort of made essentially invisible.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

I mean, think about and ambulance drivers drivers need this. Like, they're not going to go learn all that, right? So, like all of this infrastructure on building the of the Thomas Brothers Guide was in the name of like every first responder, like that's crazy. And there's an interesting social geography encoded in the Thomas Guide that I find compelling now. Um, the way the guide is organized, the grid system, the page structure, the coverage boundaries, all of it reflects a particular set of decisions about what the county is and how it should be understood. Which communities get detailed coverage, which streets are considered significant enough to label at a given scale, um, where the coverage area ends, where the editorial decisions that have consequences for who can navigate effectively and who can't. A Thomas guide that doesn't cover a particular neighborhood in detail is functionally telling people in well-covered areas that the uncovered neighborhood isn't somewhere they need to find their way to. I guess. Well, I mean, you know what I mean? Like, like, like if you couldn't turn to page 328 and see a detail of Downey, well then who in the hell needs to go to Downey? Like, I maybe that's what that's what it is, right? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_07 17:16

It's downy. Sorry, Danny listeners in Downey.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

I was gonna call I was gonna say um Fontuckey, but I just thought, no, I shouldn't.

SPEAKER_07 17:23

Well, my brother doesn't live in Fontana anymore, so but uh you know, I remember there's actually supplements to the Thomas guide, too. So can you imagine you're you know you got the guide open and it's like where did it go? Where I I just drove off the map.

SPEAKER_06 17:39

Oh no. And then wait, go get the little book. Give me the little book. Yeah, exactly. Give me the little book. Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_07 17:46

Yeah. The Triple A, the American Automobile Association, runs a parallel tradition of uh triptych personalized route maps. Oh, are you a triptych fan?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

I love the triptych. I'll still go get one. I I just love the whole thing. Like, tell me where are you going? Like, I love the whole thing. I just I love all of it. Love all of it.

SPEAKER_07 18:07

I remember going into a triple A office when I was a kid because we were going cross-country, and my dad was like, Well, I'm a triple A member, and he had like the highest level triple A, you know, with free hundred-mile towing and the whole like dude, he had the it was like a platinum, platinum triple A or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

It was a triple A black card.

SPEAKER_07 18:28

Pretty much, pretty much. So we had to get the maps, you know, to go in.

SPEAKER_06 18:32

So where you going? You know, yeah. Which states are you traveling through?

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Oh, any particular thing you want to see on the way, honey? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 18:45

Love it.

SPEAKER_06 18:45

Well, we we were thinking we want to take US historic US 50. Oh, well, that's in this book here. Here's the you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah, they go to the big file cabinet, pull out the map. Yeah, trip to the page. And they'd have to pull like 15 of them because you're going a really long way. And then they pull out the highlighter and they start showing you the route. Oh yeah, the highlighter.

SPEAKER_07 19:05

Yeah, the triptick is a custom strip map US AAA produced for a specific journey of member requests. Narrow vertical panels, each covering a segment of the route, bounded to a flip book, which you know you follow from top to bottom as you drive, which like this is a totally, totally different than the Thomas Guide experience. It shows only the roads relevant to your trip, though, you know, with written turn-by-turn instructions and the margins. A member planning a cross-country trip would visit their local triple A office, describe the route, and receive a custom-produced trip tick that served as both map and instruction set. Production was done by hand and until computerized systems arrived in the 80s.

The Rise of the Triptych

SPEAKER_01 19:46

The trip tick is interesting because it's solving the same cognitive load problem that GPS eventually solves through a completely different mechanism. Instead of giving you the full context and asking you to extract the relevant path, it gives you only the relevant path with all the context stripped away. You don't have to maintain spatial orientation relative to the whole map. You just follow interstate 40. Ta-da, right? The trade-off is that you lose the ability to respond intelligently to unexpected situations like, you know, tornadoes or, you know, jackknife rigs or whatever else you're going to run into.

SPEAKER_07 20:22

I-40 is closed.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

I-40 closed. I got no, I don't know how to get around it now because there's literally no map stuff on outside of Interstate 40. So it can't help you recover from a deviation. It only knows about the trip you planned in advance, which is only like as long as nothing goes wrong, you'll be fine.

SPEAKER_07 20:43

But you know what? Those cross-country, I you know, as a kid, we did cross-country all the time. And there was always a freaking closure on I-10 or I-40 or I-80, all the big, you know. Yeah, those three roads across the country. Yeah. It was like, oh, come on. Uh spatial cognition research distinguishes two types of navigational knowledge. Survey knowledge is a mental model of the geography, including the relationship between places. Route knowledge is a sequence of landmarks and instructions for a specific journey. The Thomas Guide builds survey knowledge. Heavy users develop a detailed mental model of the city that persists and transfers to new situations. The triptych builds only route knowledge, which is useful for the specific trip and essentially non-transferable. GPS, which came after, turns out to build almost no spatial knowledge of either kind. This has measurable consequences for the navigational ability of people who rely on it exclusively.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

You know, I you know, I do a lot of road trips, and Andy and I do a he comes once a year. We do big roads, well, not big, but at least up and down the state of California, which is big. And he always says to me, He's like, I'm always surprised how well you know where you're going. I'm like, I don't know where I'm going. I literally don't know where I'm going. I know I'm supposed to be on the 101, and I know that way's home, and I'm not going that way. So I'm gonna go this way. Like, I literally don't know what I'm doing. But I seem like, well, Sam says that too. Like when I'm walking places, I walk with such confidence that people follow me and I don't know where I'm going.

SPEAKER_05 22:21

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

And it's because my last name is Murphy, not Magellan. I get lost with a damn map. Like forget it. Just for don't listen to me. That's my just don't listen to me. I don't know where I'm going. There.

SPEAKER_07 22:34

So I thought a lot about this, and I because I love maps and I love GPS. Right. A map is a representation of a place. Like it's a physical or it's a it's a two-dimensional representation, right? Of a real thing. It's got you know features and function and all of that. And the Thomas Guide itself represents Los Angeles County on paper, compressed and indexed. You read that representation and decide where to go. A GPS doesn't represent anything, it holds your current coordinates and your destination coordinates. And it calculates a path between them. That path is generated on demand. It doesn't exist before you ask for it. Now there's a little bit of a caveat there with modern systems and software optimization and all of that, but GPS's technology itself doesn't have any of that. It didn't exist, you know, that that path doesn't exist before you asked for it. The same distinction shows up outside of navigation. So this is why I think about this all the time. Because right now I'm like knee deep in this. If you build software, it's the difference between a protocol specification and a Hatios API. It's not important what Hadios means, but it makes sense in a second. A specification, 5,000 line document describing everything the system can do. Right? You read it and work out how to call the system. A Hatios API, the reason I say Hadios is because it's a discoverable API. And it tells the client what to do it at due next each step. So the client never needs a whole document. One is a representation, the map. The other is a generated sequence of instructions. Maps ask you to find your own way. GPS hands you the way. The global positioning system is a Department of Defense program that begins serious development in the early 1970s. It builds on earlier military satellite navigation systems, including transit, which the Navy used for submarine navigation in the 60s. It's not really important for this. The design specification came from the military's operational requirements, a system that can tell a user their position anywhere on Earth in three dimensions, any weather, continuously with accuracy sufficient for weapons guidance. And that's one that's why we have GPS. The constellation that achieves this cons consists of 24 satellites that was later expanded. They sit in a medium Earth orbit at an altitude of approximately 20,000 kilometers, arranged in six orbital planes. At least four satellites are visible from any point on Earth's surface at any time.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Which is handy because you want your GPS to work.

SPEAKER_07 25:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Right.

SPEAKER_07 25:18

Well, you know, I'm wondering how this works since the Earth is flat. How is it possible?

SPEAKER_01 25:23

Oh, you're a flat earther, huh?

SPEAKER_07 25:27

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

I mean, I'm a Bigfoot person, but even us Bigfoot people are like, it's round, dude. It's round.

SPEAKER_07 25:34

Yeah, it's definitely round.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

The physics of how GPS works is one of those things that sounds almost impossibly elegant once you understand it. Each satellite broadcasts a continuous single signal that contains two things, a precise time stamp from an atomic clock and the satellite's exact orbital position. Your receiver picks up the signals from the multiple satellites simultaneously and measures the time delay between each signal's transition and transmission and its arrival. Since the signal travels at the speed of light, the time delay corresponds to a distance. With the distance from our four satellites and their known positions, you can solve for your position in three dimensional space. Plus, correct for the clock error in your receiver. Now, if you're going to do this all by hand, good luck.

SPEAKER_07 26:23

It's a lot of decimal places.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Right. The accuracy of the whole system depends on the precision of the atomic clocks aboard the satellites, which are actu accurate to roughly a few nanoseconds. That's why it tells you to stop right in front of the building you're supposed to be in front of.

SPEAKER_07 26:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 26:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

It's the atomic clock doing that, not your car. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 26:45

Well, more satellites in view equals you know more precise location. So but yeah, nanoseconds. Like that's a lot of digits, you know, which people and you know, so that calculation, you know, that that time distance, you think about the speed of light, and you got two satellites, the distance between those two satellites, time distance between you and those satellites, it's yeah, it's very precise.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

It's a lot of math. It's a lot of math.

SPEAKER_07 27:15

It's a lot of math. Well, it's not actually not it's actually pretty simple math, but it's a lot of decimal places. So yeah.

SPEAKER_06 27:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 27:24

I'm sure you learned it in high school, right? Triangulation and stuff. I'm sure you're yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Yeah, you solve for how fast something's moving.

SPEAKER_07 27:34

Until uh May 2000, civilian GPS operated under uh deliberate accura accuracy degradation. Isn't that funny? You know, it's like, hey, we don't want it too accurate, folks.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yeah, we don't want to know too much about exactly where you are.

SPEAKER_07 27:49

Yeah. That that shaped the entire first decade of consumer GPS development. The military built sensitive availability into uh or selective availability, I'm sorry, into the system. It introduced a deliberate error into the civilian GPS signal and degraded position accuracy to roughly 100 meters. That's a that's a lot, 100 meters. The reasoning was that adversaries shouldn't be able to use American military infrastructure for precision weapons guidance. Consumer GPS receivers in the 1990s would tell you roughly where you were within a city block or two. Useful for some applications, not really precise enough for navigation. The Clinton administration turned off selective availability on the first of May 2000. Position accuracy for civilian receivers improved essentially overnight from about 100 meters or so to about 15 meters. That single policy decision unlocked the consumer GPS market.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

And there were already people building civilian GPS navigation products in the 1990s, working with the selective availability constraint. And the technology that emerges from that period is fascinatingly precise because it has to solve a hard navigation problem with degraded position data. Dead reckoning, using the vehicle speed and heading to propagate position between GPS fixes is incorporated into navigation systems to smooth over the accuracy gaps. Map matching, using the known road network to constrain position estimates to plausible locations compensates for the positional uncertainty. The consumer GPS products of the late 1990s are doing sophisticated computational work to produce a usable navigation experience from inherently imprecise endpoint input data. So it's almost like taking, here's what it's doing. It's taking the trip tick and saying, okay, you're you're definitely going forward on the 40. At least we know that. Like that's what nav in the 1990s is doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 29:50

Yeah. Yeah. Well, oh, we know that you turned. We know that you're supposed to turn on this road. The distance and speed equals this, therefore, we think you're approximately here, you know. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

That's how current nav works in New Mexico everywhere. I just want you to know that. Like you never know what the hell road you're on in New Mexico. Just gonna put it out there.

SPEAKER_07 30:12

Well, can you imagine like you're an engineer and you're designing one of these systems, and you know that there's this, you know, selective availability, you know, issue, and you're trying to calculate the math and stuff. It's like that would be really frustrating, you know. Right? Like oh man, my worst job. Yeah. My equations are supposed to be like this, man.

unknown 30:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 30:39

Russia operates a parallel satellite navigation system called GLONAS. It reached full operational capability in the mid-1990s, degraded through economic disruptions of that period, and was reconstituted in the 2000s. The Europeans, uh, the the EU, European Union's Galileo reached initial operational capability in 2016. Yeah. China, and it's still like they're still working on it, let's say. Yeah, China operates by do modern consumer navigation systems, including smartphones, receive signals from multiple constellations at once. Do you know assisted GPS? Have you ever heard that? Like a GPS? Yeah, it's like, okay, you got GPS, but they'll use multiple systems and then also use local network signals, towers, cells. Yeah. And and that, you know, yeah, modern consumer navigation devices, including you know, phones, receive all of that from different constellations at once. That improves the accuracy and reliability compared to single constellation uh receivers. And that used to be a marketing thing where they would say, you know, how many constellations it could, you know, it could interface with. The GPS acronym has become generic in consumer usage, but the actual positioning infrastructure is a multi-constellation global system with geopolitical dimensions. Each constellation is operated by a different sovereign entity entity. Access to each could theoretically be restricted.

SPEAKER_01 32:13

Well, I mean, isn't that why everybody built their own, right? Like you don't want America to shut yours down just because they're mad at you this week.

SPEAKER_07 32:19

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's how you would mess with somebody. Like if somebody's using your your military infrastructure, you'd shut it down.

unknown 32:26

You know.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Well, don't you think it's interesting that that Clinton says, you know, in in 2000, all bets are off, you can use it, you can use the whole thing, and then that's the year Russia comes out with it. Like it just seems a little too well nice.

SPEAKER_07 32:40

Yeah, I mean, it's like there's there wasn't a strategic advantage, you know, any longer. And there were huge economic benefits from letting, you know, letting that loose in the public domain. So yeah.

SPEAKER_06 32:53

So I no, no.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

So I'm I'm being a facetious jerk, no.

The Transition to Digital Navigation

SPEAKER_07 33:00

I could so I lived through that sort of last stretch of the Thomas Guide being the only option. I I when I met you. I worked in the field service in Los Angeles from you know 95-ish to 98, 99. You know, most mornings I'd pick up a stack of service calls and sometimes just addresses on a street. And I'd have to plot the routes, you know, across the county, or not, you know, not usually the whole county, but you know, Los Angeles area using the Thomas guide in the passenger seat, right? You turn the pages, you stop lights, you know, you hold your finger on the grid square and you like, you know, look at it while you try and emerge. It's not it's not a safe way to navigate, and everyone, you know, who did it knew knew that. MapQuest turns up in early 1996, I know, as a website. Within a year, you know, my dispatcher was printing turn-by-turn directions for every call and then stacking the calls in geographic order. So, you know, making the routes efficient for me. Same road, same job, but I'm not reading on the book, you know, I'm not getting distracted. I'm not spending 20 minutes trying to map up, map it all out. And that transition before portable GPS and before the phone, um, just somebody at a desk with internet access and a printer is a step most navigation histories just sort of skip over. But it was the first time the cognitive load kind of came off the driver. And MapQuest is like it's it uses, you know, all of these, these myriad of atlases that we've got. And it feels like GPS, but it's it's it's not, you know.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

It's not, it's not, it's a it's a turn-by-turn list of where you're going next. And it had a little map to kind of orientate you to like where it is, right?

SPEAKER_05 34:42

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

And it was like, okay, go straight for two and a half miles, make a right on this street. Like, right on. Yeah. Not turn east, make a right. Like that helps the person from the east coast for sure. Yeah. Um, because we don't do east and west, north and south. We do left-right, you know, kind of things. Yeah. That's only a long time to get used to in California.

SPEAKER_07 35:00

Yeah, and east. Yeah. Everybody in California does it. My dad did that, you know, probably still does. And you're like, well, is that a left or is that a right?

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Right. Like, I don't know. So the first consumer GPS devices are handheld units marketed primarily to hikers, boaters, uh, outdoor enthusiasts, Mark, because he was an Eagle Scout. And they look exactly like what they are military technology miniaturized into consumer package without any particular attention to the user experience. The like they were gray. They were stupid and gray. They look like the old pagers back in the day, right? Like that's pretty much what it was. The Garmin GPS 100 personal navigator, um, introduced in 1991, displays your position as coordinates on a small LC L C D screen. Latitude and longitude, just numbers. No map, no voice, no indication of what the numbers mean in terms of where you should go. You look at the numbers and then you figure out what they imply. It's a, and I guess for someone who you know uses a compass, that'd that'd be okay. You could look at a longitude-latitude map and say, okay, I know where I'm at, and here's where I want to go, and I'll just check my position in an hour or so, see if I'm still on the right path. Like I could see why that would be helpful. Again, last name Murphy, not Magellan. So it wouldn't have helped me. Um, it's a position sensor in a handheld form factor, and using it for navigation requires you to supply all the contextual knowledge that transforms the coordinates into a route. Good luck if you don't have it.

SPEAKER_07 36:31

Yeah. That's terrible. Yeah. So here you go. Here's where you are in the world.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Right. Like, oh, I'm at 1.28694416. That's not helpful. Like, that's not helpful. I don't know.

SPEAKER_07 36:44

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Thank you. Wow. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm glad I'm paying a lot of money for this.

SPEAKER_07 36:49

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and in a very like inelegant uh user interface as well. Yeah. The the mapping layer is what changes everything, though, right? This is this is it goes from sort of novelty items for you know recreational folks to actually essential uh component. Yeah, but adding it requires solving two problems at once. You have to store a road network database on a device with very limited storage capacity. You also have to build yeah, I remember that. Remember some of them have like little SIM cards, you know, and you have to have to build an interface that prevents the database usefully or presents the database usefully on a small screen. Early in-dash navigation systems in the mid-90s installed in luxury vehicles by Honda, Toyota, and BMW, use CD-ROM map data with a separate CD for each geographic region.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Like if you want an update to the NAV map in the in the convertible, you gotta go buy a new CD. And it ain't cheap.

SPEAKER_07 37:54

No, I know, I know. The Honda Electro gyro gyrocater appears as early as 1981 as one of the first commercially available in-car navigation systems. It uses inertial navigation rather than GPS. Gyroscopes and distance sensors tracked the vehicle's movement from a known starting position has no maps in the modern sense and no satellite input. It just remembers where you've driven and shows a trace of your path overlaid on a transparent map, you know, sheet with your place on the screen.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

That transparent map sheet that you place on the screen is one of my most favorite details in the whole history of navigation technology because it's just such a perfect example of a transitional technology that combines a new capability with an old interface assumption. The new capability is electronic position tracking. The old interface assumption is that navigation inherently involves a paper map. The technology can't yet imagine a navigation without paper, so it builds around the paper, right? It takes another generation of development before anyone figures out that the map can live entirely inside that device. And finally you have what you cognitively can recognize with the data behind it to make it make sense.

SPEAKER_07 39:10

Yeah. Remember, memory though is like expensive.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

It wouldn't, you'd have to like that Garmin stuff, you had to keep it plugged in in the car. Like you could not ever really unplug it. And and it wasn't back lit, so don't think you're gonna look at it in the car.

SPEAKER_07 39:25

Oh, I know. Yeah, no, the crappy screen, and the screen's like, you know, like slow and everything. Yeah, but okay, so we get Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom. Wasn't TomTom the one that was sort of like a scrappy, you know, they had the like you could get like the Homer Simpson as one of the voices and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

Yeah, yeah. Or for a while it was Stephen Colbert when he did the Colbert rapport. Yeah, he did, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 39:50

They they kind of emerge as dominant players in the portable GPS navigation market, and it takes shape after selective availability is turned off in 2000. The Garmin Street Pilot series, the TomTomGo, and their equivalents uh form competing man from competing manufacturers, bring together GPS positioning, stored road network databases, route calculation, and turn-by-turn voice guidance in a portable unit that mounts to the windshield or the dashboard. The voice guidance is the element that makes the technology accessible to people who are not comfortable reading a screen while driving. You should not be reading a screen while driving. Right. Are you saying like maybe perhaps? No, no.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Well, my my sunglasses are always single vision, so I can't read anything that's like small. So yeah, yeah, right. They needed to talk to me.

SPEAKER_07 40:43

Yeah, no, that's good. You you don't have to look at the device, you just listen to it. The disembodied voice telling you to turn right in 400 feet is a user interface breakthrough. That removes the last cognitive barrier between the tech and mass adoption.

The Smartphone Revolution

SPEAKER_01 40:57

So the TomTomGo launches in 2004 and the Garmin New V in 2005, and both sell in extraordinary numbers. These are the devices that can complete the transition for most drivers. They're affordable, portable, they work anywhere without installation. And that's important. You have to install this anywhere. You could take it with you when you got out of the car, and you probably should, or your car would get broken into. And the voice guidance makes them usable while driving without training or practice. By 2007 or 2008, a significant fraction of the of the driving population in developed countries was using standalone GPS navigation devices regularly. So the Thomas Guide publishes, now it's still publishing, but it like the Thomas Brothers published its final edition in 2005, which feels like a symbolic end date, even though the actual transition behavior takes several more years to complete. But one more time, like if you go to Amazon right now and look up the Thomas Guide, Rand McNally still produces them. They're still 50 bucks. You can still buy one. It's a couple years out of date, but they're still there. I might get Sam one for a stocking stuff or not.

SPEAKER_05 42:04

That would be fun. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

You know, right? He'll love it.

unknown 42:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:07

If he doesn't listen to this podcast, so he'll never know.

SPEAKER_06 42:10

Oh, he doesn't listen. Oh.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

Yeah, is he in our subscribe? Yeah, he doesn't subscribe. Go look at the list. He's not in there. Go ahead. Well, uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 42:19

I I think yeah, they get bought or something, right? Thomas Thomas Brothers gets bought.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Yeah, by Rand McNow.

SPEAKER_07 42:24

Yeah, Ran. Yeah. So the the map data behind these devices is just as important as the hardware. Companies like Navtech and Tele Atlas, the two dominant suppliers of digital road network data in this area, employ thousands of field researchers who drive roads, verify data, and update databases on a continuous cycle. The map database for a GPS navigation product represents an enormous ongoing investment in geographic data, data collection that is largely invisible to the user. When the navigation system tells you to turn onto a street that was renamed two years ago or routes you down a road that was recently closed, you're experiencing the boundary of that data collection investment. The map is always a representation of the road network as it was at a specific point in time, not as it is right now.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

So the standalone GPS device market peaks around 2008 and then collapses with remarkable speed. Crazy, crazy. And the reason is the iPhone and then the Android, and specifically the combination of GPS receivers integrated into smartphones with Google Maps, which Google had been building since 2005 and which launches turn-by-turn navigation on Android in 2009. The value proposition of the standalone GPS devices destroyed almost overnight, which with everything else. I mean, the smartphone, you could probably call it one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. It really did it did disrupt in a real way. 21st. Yeah. So why carrying it? Separate device uh that costs$200 uh and and has a static map database when your phone does the same thing for free with a map that updates continuously from the cloud. Like why why bother?

SPEAKER_07 44:12

Yeah yeah well for sure. You know, and even I think there were some of the those standalone ones that even did they were music players too.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

So that's how that's how sad it got, right? Like we need to be an iPhone too. We need to be no, we need to be an iPod too. People want to listen to music while they sort of listen to us tell them where to go. Like like you didn't have a radio with a CD player, right? That's so sad. It's just sad.

SPEAKER_07 44:37

Yeah. It's such a transitional device. Uh and they're like, I mean, they they still they're still around. You can still get them and stuff, you know, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 44:47

Well, yeah, because if it look like let's put it this way if I'm out hunting for Bigfoot, there's a good chance my cell phone won't work because there'll be no cell tower, right? But I might need satellite connectivity to know where I am, and that's when a Garmin would be really helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can see why that would.

SPEAKER_07 45:02

Yeah, the backcountry users are big, you know, big users there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 45:06

Google Maps navigation and the Waze acquisition that Google completed in 2013 represents a huge shift in navigation technology beyond simply moving from hardware to software. The navigation system is now gets connected, right? It has access to real-time traffic data aggregated for millions of users simultaneously. Yeah. It can reroute. It can reroute dynamically when traffic conditions change. You know what there's this weird condition though, like when Waze does you know its calculations and stuff, where in small neighborhoods, especially, where you know, if something happens, then a ton of traffic shows up on somebody's you know side street or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 45:48

Oh yeah, because it'll it'll be it'll route around into like a one-way street. Like yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's trying to cut like 30 seconds off of something. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 45:58

I remember I remember um yeah, well, I wasn't in LA at the time, but I I was I knew somebody that was doing it, and it kept routing people through the hills, you know, through like Tipanga Canyon, and you know, like yeah, Laurel Canyon and stuff. It's like, no. I mean, I love driving the canyons, but that's crazy. Yeah, yeah. No, that's not faster. Trust me. When there's traffic, it's bad. Yeah. You know, but those those maps, those navigation systems, you know, when you connect them up right, you know, you all that dynamic routing is is great. But it knows about accidents and road closures and constructions, you know, pretty much in near real time. Although I gotta say, Waze is still a little hard to report like the inter like I'm driving. I can't be touching and messing with the screen.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Oh, right. Like, did that accident clear? Like, I don't I don't know.

SPEAKER_07 46:49

Yeah, it can compare multiple routes and estimate travel times that account for current conditions rather than historical averages. The standalone GPS device just it just couldn't do any of this. It worked from whatever snapshot of the road network happened to be on the device when you bought it.

SPEAKER_01 47:04

So Waze is worth pausing on because it introduced a genuinely new element to the navigation, like crowdsourcing. That's awesome. Waze users actively reported hazards, cops. Like if there was, if somebody noticed a speed trap, they'd be like, cops. Road closures, accidents, yeah. And those reports flow into the routing algorithm at near real time. Every Waze user is simultaneously a navigation consumer and a data contributor. The map is built and maintained collectively by the people using it. That's a fundamentally different model than either the Thomas Guide, which is built by professionals with editorial control, or the standalone GPS, which used a commercial database with defined update cycles. The Waze map is a living document that the community writes continuously. And it's so dependent on the community that it's gamified. Like you get badges for as many times as you talk about cops.

SPEAKER_05 48:00

I do. Right?

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Like so, like, like they're constantly trying to keep you engaged. So if if you did drive past an accident, is that accident still there? Like because they need the information. And if they can get one of you to tell them, you know, they'll give you a badge. And like, and so if you're a really big user of that and you really want to contribute to your fellow drivers, then yay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 48:20

I'm okay with that. You know.

SPEAKER_01 48:22

I don't care.

SPEAKER_06 48:23

I think there's some Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 48:25

I'm I'm not sure I like you know that Google knows where I'm driving and stuff, but yeah. I like, you know, helping other drivers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:35

So just think of that instead. Think that you're helping other drivers, not helping Google find you. I know. Yeah.

unknown 48:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 48:43

The traffic data that smartphone navigation systems collect is generated mostly from the GPS traces of users who consent to location data sharing. When millions of phones are reporting their position and speed simultaneously, the aggregate data creates an accurate real-time picture of traffic flow on every road in the coverage area. This is the data that drive that drives the travel time estimates and routing recommendations. It's also, from a privacy standpoint, an extraordinarily detailed record of where people go, when they go there, what routes they take, and how frequently they visit specific locations. The navigation utility and the surveillance capability are they're inseparable. The data that enables the real-time traffic intelligence is the same data that enables location profiling.

Apple Maps vs. Google Maps

SPEAKER_01 49:32

Do you remember what we used to do back in the day, though? And it was it was SIG Alert, right? This guy named Sigmund. Like he invented this alerting system. Then it's just, you can see it on the freeways in California. There'll be these round outlines in the freeway, and you're driving over them at a certain speed, and there's so many going over at a certain time, then it can tell you the 10 freeway was moving at 45 miles an hour at this time at this day, or it's not moving at all. And then it'll tell you at what exit the accident happened. Because if it's not moving at all, someone wrecked, right? And then that's when you say to yourself, someone better be dead. I swear to God, I'm gonna kill them, right? Because you're be sitting in this traffic forever. But I mean, like we had some, like in California, we have because we have so many freeways and there's so much traffic that Sig Alert system, yeah, and cameras, like Sig Alert was like how we used to do that stuff. You could look it up on the internet and on the BlackBerry, it was painful, but you could at least know what was going on. Like if you're sitting in traffic on the 10 and it was a parking lot, you'd be like, what is going on? And you could find it on SIG Alert. So Apple Maps launched in 2012 as a replacement for Google Maps on iOS. And it it was, and we're gonna be charitable here. It wasn't ready. It just wasn't ready. The launch is catastrophic enough that Apple CEO Tim Cook issues a public apology, which is not a thing that happens often in the tech industry. We usually get from the tech industry, well, you know, maps are hard. Like that's what we should have got. Not really sorry that this is such a cluster. Like it was really, it was they took it back. They took it back.

SPEAKER_07 51:06

I'm really sorry. And how about you use these other apps that are better than that?

SPEAKER_01 51:11

Right, use Google for a while, and we'll be back later. Bridges rendered in an impossible three-dimensional curves. There were whole missing towns. A major airport was labeled absolutely wrong. The fundamental problem is that Google had spent seven years and a ton of money building and verifying its map database, and Apple tried to compress that investment into a shorter development cycle. I don't even know how they did it. They probably were like, hey, go outside and look and see if our driveway is empty. I don't know what they did. Like it was bad. The quality gap is immediately visible to anyone who uses both products. Apple Maps, and I have to tell you, today, I like Apple Maps. I actually use it a lot. Has spent this has spent the subsequent decade working to close that gap, and by most accounts, has largely succeeded in developed markets. But the 2012 launch remains a reference point for what happens when you underestimate the complexity of the data layer.

SPEAKER_07 52:07

Yeah, yeah. I I don't I I actually prefer Apple Maps just from a user interface perspective, you know, user experience. Yeah. It's it's cleaner and simpler. Um it's a little easier to deal with. Google Maps is not like it's got some it's got some quirks, you know, on the UX. It's not, I don't know.

unknown 52:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:29

I think Apple Play works really good too in the car. So like that mapping system works really.

SPEAKER_07 52:34

Yeah, yeah. I had that on the on my bins, and then um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 52:39

It was good. The the navigation algorithm itself has evolved in ways that you know aren't really visible to the user interface. Early GPS navigation used simple graph search over a road network to calculate shortest or fastest routes. Modern navigation systems use machine learning models trained on historical travel time data, time of day and day of week patterns, real-time incident data, and individual driver behavior patterns. The estimated time of arrival that Google Maps shows you is the output of a prediction model trained on billions of trips. It accounts for the specific road segments, typical congestion pattern at that time on that day of that week. The accuracy of those estimates has improved over the past decade as the training data is accumulated.

The Cognitive Effects of GPS

SPEAKER_01 53:27

Can I tell you it's really good because it makes sense? Like you'll see, I live close to the fairgrounds where they have Coachella. Like, try to like ask it how you're gonna get down to Palm Springs. Like, should I take the 10? It's like, absolutely not. Yeah. Do not take the 10. Like, get on the 111 and don't look back. Like, yeah, it really does know at this time of day, like how long is it gonna take me to on this day, on this time of day, historically, how long has it taken to get there? It's not usually wrong. So that's pretty good, right? Okay, well, there's a body of cognitive science research on what GPS navigation does to spatial cognition. And the findings are not reassuring if you care about the long-term health of your navigational ability. Unlike most people, I don't care. I never had any to begin with. The research associated mostly prominently with neuroscientist Eleanor McGuire's work on London taxi drivers.

SPEAKER_05 54:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

It established that navigational experience produces measurable structural change in the hippocampus, the brain region associated with spatial memory and navigation. Because London cab drivers, who for decades have been required to learn the knowledge, which is a comprehensive mental map of London's 25,000 streets, they have a larger hippocampus volume than anybody else matched in the controls, right? Navigation builds the brain. GPS actually doesn't. Those guys spend five years as apprentices learning the book, the knowledge, so that they can, when you say, I want to go somewhere, they know how to get you there. And those streets are crazy in London. So hats off to them.

SPEAKER_07 55:06

I mean, when I was living in the city was when Uber first launched. Oh, yeah. But this guy never knew where they were going. Oh yeah. And you know, I can't remember. I I was living in Covent Garden. I needed to get to to Heathrow, and it was before the the tube was running at that time of the morning, and and the tube sucks from Covent Garden to Heathrow, anyways, and the Elizabeth line didn't exist. It was like, well, how do you get over there? Well, you gotta take a car. And so I had an Uber, and I was gonna take an Uber from Covent Garden to Paddington and then take the train from Paddington to Peter. The express. The dude didn't know where Paddington was. Like, come on now. How can you not you're driving in the city, and how can you not know where Paddington is? Like, and if I had done that with a black cab, you know, the guy would have been there, you know, be like, okay, which which exit do you want to which side do you want me to drop you off at? You know? And you know, so I will always use the black cab guys because they have to have they have to know the book.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 56:10

And like when I was living in Covent Garden, I lived it was the street I was I was on, it was an alley. Like to call it a street would be generous at best.

SPEAKER_01 56:20

Oh, like where we went and had that Italian dinner once. It was on an alley. Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 56:27

Yeah. That that was that was my place. You know, it was like above the the Belgian pub, you know, behind the this, you know, on this street. And you know, the these guys always knew where it was. It was one of the shortest streets in the city, and they always knew where it was. So it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So subsequent research is has looked at GPS users specifically. People who navigate mostly by GPS show less hippocampal active activation. Let me try that again. Less hippocampal activation than people who navigate from memory. They also develop less accurate mental maps of environments they navigate regularly with the device on. The spatial knowledge. Yeah, don't do it. Don't do it. The spatial knowledge the Thomas guide forced you to develop came from understanding how streets, neighborhoods, and the larger structure of the city connected. Audio instructions don't build that knowledge. You can follow GPS guides successfully without ever building a model of where you are.

SPEAKER_01 57:34

Do it all the time. The practical consequences will show up when the technology fails, which on road trips, occasionally this happens, right? People who navigate exclusively by GPS and encounter a dead zone, a tunnel, maybe your phone dies, a situation where the system routes you incorrectly often have genuinely no ability to recover using their own spatial knowledge because that knowledge was never built. No, you do what I do. You pull over, you cry for a while, you find a gas station, or you find a Best Buy and buy a new charger for the phone, like whatever the hell it was. First I cry and then I get myself together and sort it out. There's documented cases of drivers following GPS instructions into rivers and off of roads onto construction zones because the instructions said go that way. And there was no internal model of the territory to override the instruction. The Thomas guide could mislead you about whether a street exist existed or what it was named, but it couldn't substitute your ability to look through the windshield and make a judgment about whether proceeding made sense. The GPS system can and sometimes does route around that judgment entirely. Like there's been times where Sam's like, she's lying to me. I'm not trusting her. Like he will ignore the nav because he's like, She's lying. She's lying. I'm going left.

SPEAKER_05 58:58

Like, yeah.

unknown 58:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 59:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:01

But he does have, he's good at, he's good at that. He has good spatial, you know, yeah knowledge. I don't. So I trust him.

SPEAKER_07 59:08

Yeah. I mean, I uh for the most part, I don't use it unless we're going to a place, you know, like that's outside of our locale. So and in that scenario, it's like because like look, we live, yeah. I've developed a pretty good spatial awareness around of where we're at and how the roads work and stuff, but this is this is not at all like driving around in rural Kent in the UK. It's worse than driving around New England, you know? Like it's worse. And so sometimes you just you just gotta you just gotta let the GPS tell you where to go. Because there's one-way lanes and country roads and stuff, and that's the only way to get there, so that's the way to go. But yeah, I I try not to I I recognize this sort of cognitive issue, so I try not to use GPS unless I have to. The the other behavioral change that navigation technology produces is in driving anxiety and confidence. Yes, I've definitely seen that. Drivers who learned before GPS typically developed a tolerance for navigational uncertainty. They could head into unfamiliar territory with the expectation of being able to figure it out. You know what I did this in I used to do this a lot when I traveled all over the world alone. If I travel alone, I would go to a city and I would purposefully get myself lost to try to find my way back. And like I did that in Japan once, and it was my first time in Japan. And let me tell you, trying to get one, it's easy to get lost in Japan. And two, once you are lost, trying to get back, it's a little tricky. Um, but yeah, so I would definitely do that. But you know, you know, GPS navigation has reduced uh that tolerance in younger drivers. Research on driving behavior finds that GPS reliant drivers are more likely to pull over when the navigation system fails. They are more likely to refuse to drive in unfamiliar areas without navigation assistance. They're more likely to report anxiety about navigation without technological support. The skill atrophies with disuse in exactly the way you'd expect. The behavior, behavioral dependency that replaces it is not always a functional substitute, though.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:31

See, that's crazy because when I go on a road trip, ask anybody. It drives Sam crazy. It's why he won't go on road trips with me. But any ask anybody else that I go on road trips with. And it's like, like, where are we going? Like we at the hotel. Like it's like, okay, what are we doing next? Okay, we're gonna go, let's go to White Sands, like military base. Okay, into the NAB, White Sands military base. That's the only place we're going. No, no, we have to be somewhere like near tombstone by the end of the day. Like, that's all I know. But I don't know how we're gonna get there. I don't bother figuring it all out. I just say this is where we're going. And then we go spend time there. Like, oh, hey, check it out. Looks, look, right down the road is White Sands National Monument. Like, let's go hang out in the sand dunes. Okay. And we just go there. And it's like, oh my God, Alamakordo, let's go check out where the ET stuff was buried. Okay. Okay, let's go there. And then, but on the way there, it's like, oh my God, the world's largest pistachio, let's pull over. Like, I guess I don't have the anxiety of like, I need to know where I'm going. I need to know what that looks like. It's just where am I going? And if I can have an active map to get me there, like that's good. That's good. But I'm never, I don't think I'm like that.

SPEAKER_07 1:02:36

Right. But you were born pre-GPS.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:39

I was. That's true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:02:42

So was I, right? So was, you know, so was Sam. So was, you know, Meredith. Right. Our kids, you know, they weren't, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:49

So no sense of adventure.

SPEAKER_07 1:02:53

Well, I don't know that it's that. I just think that, you know, they they they they think about it differently. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's to be honest, like, like you know, our oldest she learned to drive in the States in that big giant truck that you know Mary Meredith drove her in. And then and then you come here, then she spent a couple years not driving at all because like one, why would you it's hard. Yeah, it is hard.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:19

Steering wheels on the wrong side, you're on the wrong side of the road, the whole thing's bad. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:24

So so it took her a while to, you know, but now she's got her own car and she drives around and you know, but it took it definitely took time to develop that. And but I think, you know, my guess is that, you know, if she's going someplace unfamiliar, she still has some level of anxiety about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

Yeah, that's fair. Again, the steering wheel's on the wrong side here on the wrong side of the road. Like that would just you know, it's funny because I Andy always drives my car. At some point during a road trip, Andy will drive my car and they make fun of how slow he drives. And he's like, listen to me, I'm on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car. You need to cut me a damn brick all the time. Like I give him crap all the time. And all the time, that's what he tells me back. And you know what? He's not wrong. Andy, you're not wrong. I I'm sorry. And yet, and yet, I don't want to be purely wistful about the Thomas Guide era, because the Thomas Guide also, it excluded people, right? It was expensive enough that not everybody had one. It required literacy and a degree of spatial reasoning that not everyone has equally. It embedded a specific model of the city that reflected the priorities of the people who made it. GPS navigation, for all its dependency and surveillance implications, it has made getting around genuinely more accessible to people who would previously have been excluded from comfortable navigation in unfamiliar environments. People with dyslexia who struggled with map reading, people with limited spatial reasoning or ability, like me, people navigating a city in a language they don't even read fluently, like all of that. The voice on your in your phone has strong opinions about your route has also quietly made the world more navigate navigable for a lot of people who found it less navigable before. So yeah, for all of its all of its perceived downside, it really helps us get somewhere, right? And and that's useful. That's useful.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:14

You know what? How many door dashers would be able to do the door dashing if they, you know, didn't have the GPS? Like if you think about it, GPS democratize things like delivery, you know, taxi driving, that sort of thing. And you know, is that is that a bad thing? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you know, no.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:39

No, I think every everybody has a right to go somewhere. You know, for a while damn it.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:44

Yeah, yeah. The the the uh the guys that were doing delivery in the in London had the book on their on their motor scooters and they would do they would do deliveries and uh you know, so they would use the use that you could see them, they'd have the Little thing and it's encased in black, you know, plastic and stuff. And um yeah, they they that's partly how you would study and learn is you would do a delivery job in the city.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:10

And oh, and when you finally were good enough at it, you'd you'd go get a cab.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:14

Oh wow. God bless them.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:17

Yeah. Every generation of navigation technology has asked less of the driver. The Thomas Guide wanted you to understand the city, the triptych wanted you to follow instructions for a single trip. GPS asked you that's your steer. You know, each of those changes sounded reasonable on its own. Driving now involves something different than it used to.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:37

A Thomas Guide is a technology that assumed you were a spatial agent navigating in a world you needed to understand. GPS is a technology that assumes you are a physical actor executing instructions in a world that the system understands on your behalf. Those are different models of what a driver is, and the shift between them has consequences for how we relate to the spaces we live and travel through. People who know their city spatially, who have a mental model for how it's organized, who know which direction is downtown and which direction is the ocean are experiencing their city differently than people whose relationship is mediated entirely through a sequence of audio instructions. I'm not, you know what? I'm they're not, I don't know which is better, but they're different. But here's what I would tell you. Like, if I can take you to Pittsburgh today, and I would not need to turn on NAB to get you anywhere where you wanted to go. Even like South Hills to North Hills, which like Sam went and I, when we first started dating, I lived on the South Side and he lived on the north side. Well, in Pittsburgh, it's South Side and North Side. So I'm living on the South side and that, and he's on the north side and that. And so he was almost geographically und you know undesirable because I had to cross, I had to go through the Liberty State. Yeah, I had to go over the river. I had to, I had to navigate downtown just to get to his side of town to get on the right freeway to get to where he was going. And that's not a city that has a belt system. The belt system, we do, it's the orange belt and the blue belt, but it's all surface streets that connect to the belt. Like it's just surface streets, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, but I can get you anywhere you want to go in Pittsburgh for real. Um, I'm not so good at it here because I relied on GPS to get me around the desert.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:19

But so was the Pamadi, was the Pomati brothers between the north and the south, somewhere where you're Yeah, so it was right in the strip district.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:25

So it's like, yeah, literally, like you could see it as you would go and over the overpass on 279 to go see Sam. Like it was right down there in the strip district. Plus, we had one on the south side. I think his closest was probably the strip district, but but yeah, he was he was almost, I mean, it takes like 40 minutes. Nothing takes 40 minutes in Pittsburgh. Everything's on top of it's not that big a town, right? Yeah, it's not that big. Yeah, but yeah, I lived in the South Hills and he lived in the North Hills, and but we kept dating.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:51

Yeah. Well, you know. No accounting for it was theater.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:55

Yeah, we always met at the theater though, because we did theater together, so we always met in the same place at the same time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:09:03

I miss Pavani Brothers, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:09:06

The next wave of navigation uh technology is already in motion. Augmented reality overlays uh project directions onto the windshield or into glass. Autonomous routing hands the navigation decisions to the vehicle. Both directions. Can you imagine? Like, what spatial awareness are you going to have if you don't know?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:27

The car knows where it is and you don't need to ever know where you are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:09:32

Yeah. Yeah. The endpoints, right? Both directions move further from the Thomas Skyde model where the driver has an actual spatial reason or the the endpoint is a car that knows where it's going and takes you there without asking you to participate. Oh, that's so bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:47

That's just so bad. I think that is a little weird. It is. And I don't know how that makes you any smarter, right? Like like Ezra. Have you ever heard of like the science of wear? Like it it's it's that platform that does spatial, you know, spatial technology. So it's it's pretty much like, you know, a ski resort would use that software platform to know where all their instructors are, um, where where the most people are, you know, where it's it's the science of where. And you use it for all kinds of stuff, right? Like, so like we use this in regular life beyond our car. And it it's a shame to think that, and I know the kind of work they do over there at Ezri. Like that's complicated stuff on a very complicated platform using tons and tons of data. Like the people who do that are brilliant, they're brilliant spatial thinkers, but they're making us all dumber in that effort, I'm afraid. Anyway, I still shout out to Ezri, the science of wear. I still have my Thomas guide. By the way, if you ever talk to people from Esri, they're always like, I'm so happy to see you.

unknown 1:10:52

I'm happy.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:52

I'm happy to see you. Now funny.

Reflections on Navigation Knowledge

SPEAKER_01 1:10:56

It's so cute. I still have my Thomas guide somewhere. It's the 1995 edition with the blue cover, the coffee ring on the front from some forgotten morning that I probably got yelled at because it's Sam's stupid map. I can't navigate from it anymore. Not because I've forgotten how, it's you know, I still know how to do that, but because the streets have changed enough, I can't trust it. And, you know, I've been outsourcing the spatial reasoning for long enough that the confidence that used to accompany a paper map is yeah, that's mostly gone for me. But I keep it because for Sam, for my husband, it represents something he wants to remember. That getting somewhere used to mean understanding where you were going, that the destination and the knowledge of how to reach it used to be the same thing. And the Thomas Guide didn't just tell you how to get there. It assumed that you were the kind of person that could get yourself there. And he he always has been and always will be. Him and my mom, they're both really good at that.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:54

Yeah. If you've ever uh been in a car when where someone was navigating from a Thomas guide and the route crossed a page boundary and everyone was quiet, you know a very specific kind of tension that no algorithm has ever been able to replicate.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:08

If GPS has ever confidently routed you somewhere that turned out to be a field or a body of water or someone's private driveway, that happened to me once. Can I just tell you I was very concerned they had a gun? Your experience is more common than the navigation industry would like to acknowledge, and you were right to be suspicious.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:26

And if you're one of those people who still knows which direction is north when you're standing in your city, it's where the mountains are, right? Uh people do not take please do not take that for granted. Uh, this is a form of knowledge that fewer people have every year.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:41

It is. This is the nostalgic nerds with the technology that changed how we find our way, also changed something about whether we know where we are. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, share this with someone who still has a Thomas guide in their car. They exist. We respect you. And we'll be back next week. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks, Mark.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:02

Thank you very much.

unknown 1:13:03

Cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:05

Feels like it's all insane.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:21

Miss Mo Street Laughing Round Three Rogers from Home Three Rogers. Which water did I lose? My mouth to roll out on it. All day down to a gold. Let me tell. When it goes down, stop going down.