Ask Lemmy

You should become a cabbie in London. They all have to memorise 320 routes, 25,000 streets and 20,000 places of interest, e.g. hotels, stations, tourist attractions and so on. It's called The Knowledge. There's some evidence that mastering The Knowledge actually alters the structure of the brain!

Road networks in most cities in my country are like someone just dropped a pot of spaghetti. The oldest urban areas here are at most 150 years old too, so it's not like we can blame the Romans.

This only works in cities with naming schema that work that way. For my city, if I wanted to go to my old college, I'd drive to Columbia Parkway and have to take Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard all the way in, or divert through downtown to Victory Parkway otherwise. Some places in the city are named logically or you know where they are, but outside of downtown, you abandon the 5th/6th/7th sort of scheme in many cities in America that weren't initially Planned Cities.

Now, you can do this in a handful of American cities (Indianapolis, for instance), but not most of them.

"You wanna go down Three Oak lane, I forget what its 'proper' name is, but there used to be a farm there called Three Oak Farm, so that's what we all call the lane round here. 'Course the farm's gone. And so have the oaks. Anyway, go along there until you get to the field where the unexploded bomb was found back in '68, and turn right. Then left past the field where the cows got sick last year. If you reach shagger's hill, you've gone too far. Now there's a ford down that way, so you can't miss it. Except, I suppose, in this weather since it hasn't rained in a month and the ford's probably dried up. Most important thing though, you don't want to start from here."

Swede here, how would using a street directory help you navigate without a map?

Sure, I know that at least here in Stockholm and it's suburbs that when a new area is being developed, they name the streets after a similar theme.

But knowing that Sommarvägen in Täby is located within the district of Hägernäs doesn't get you very far.

Actually a much better way was to use a street directory if you know your way around the town even a bit.

You generally only had a street directory of your OWN town, outside of specific professional settings.

Going along with reading a map most people don’t know how roads and exits are numbered. It’s not a random jumble. This makes reading a map and just knowing what direction you’re traveling in general much easier. This is for the US.

Interstates

1 or 2 Digits: Main routes. North-South routes have odd numbers, increasing from west to east (e.g., I-5 to I-95). East-West routes have even numbers, increasing from south to north (e.g., I-10 to I-90).

3 Digits (Even First Number): A loop or beltway that connects to the main interstate at both ends.

3 Digits (Odd First Number): A spur route that connects to the main interstate at only one end.

Exit numbers

They mirror the mile markers which show up on maps. Numbers increase from south to north or west to east. So you could basically make a ‘cheat sheet’ of your exit numbers. Then while driving you know how far till your next exit.

I’ve seen this not be true on occasion but it should be mostly true. If the exit sign is on the right of the road sign then the exit is to the right. If it’s on the left then it exits to the left.

All knowledge that I feel got lost to time for the most part. They should teach it in drivers ed but I don’t think they do.

As someone who travelled for work before and after smartphones, absolutely. You couldn't just open Google Maps, search a business and go there, the problem wasn't going city to city, but finding a specific place in or outside a city. If you got a request to go to X business either you already knew how to get there, or it would take some planning.

Nowadays my company can receive a request from a customer in another country, and in 1 hour they can plan the trip, reserve the rental car, book a plane, book an hotel for the night. That just wasn't possible in the past.

The main maps I used for driving (back in the day, UK, 1986) were 'books' rather than large fold out maps. At local level, an A to Z. At national level, an AA road map, this has the format of a small newspaper, however in thicker paper.

I wonder if it took quite a bit longer for people to reach their destination. Because not everyone would be as good at reading maps (compared to simply following gps instructions) Maybe that made it more common for people to arrive at different times. or plan longer trips because the driving would take up a bigger part of it.

Oh it absolutely did. You would regularly have to stop (often after a turn or if you felt like you missed one) and reconsult the map. You just accounted for that additional time. Longer trips are often less of an issue, because its usually, you get to a big main highway and its cruise most of the rest of the way.

And plenty of times, you might get lost/ not be able to find yourself on the map. You'd have to pull over and ask for help/ directions. You might write the directions down on a piece of paper, but that doesn't do you much good if you missed a turn and didn't know it.

Depends on the area and how familiar it is and how hostile it is to navigation. I can beat the Google maps time 9 out if 10 times in Seattle because Google sends you through some seriously dumb intersections.

That reminds me that I never moved the map from old car to the ~~new~~ current one.