GPS and the End of the Road

GPS and the End of the Road
Ari N. Schulman
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night?
-Jack Kerouac
Each generation reimagines the allure of the unknown world, and rein-
vents the means of discovering it. The greatest journeyer, Odysseus,
traveled by ship, beset by monsters and the whims of the gods, seeking
not new lands or conquests but only to return home. Later wayfarers
yearned for odysseys of their own; but since the Old World was by then
pretty well tamed and charted, the old gods vanquished and the dragons
fought back to the corners of the maps, they set out on horseback in shin-
ing armor, seeking after a quest for questing's sake. The finest of these
knights errant, Don Quixote, readily acknowledged that he'd taken to the
road because it was better than the inn.
The Age of Exploration that drew Europe to the Americas made
the world seem, at least at first, bigger and more mysterious. The ensu-
ing conquests and technical innovations seemed to open new frontiers
just as quickly as they closed old ones: the exploration and charting of
the unknown continent gave way to pioneers and prospectors; the tam-
ing of the West gave way to settlers. Even once the Americas had been
crisscrossed with rails and paved roads, a new age of discovery was
opened -- the age of personal discovery celebrated in the mythology of
Kerouac and the open road. The horizon of the unknown is constantly
shifting, but not necessarily receding.
If each successive era has closed an old realm of exploration while
opening up another, then what are we to make of the innovations in navi-
gational technologies that have just gotten underway in earnest over the
last ten years? The rise of digital mapping and the Global Positioning
System (GPS) has seemed to come upon us almost as a matter of course,
blended in with the general dawning of the digital age, and on its own
relatively unremarked -- but it has in a blink ushered in the greatest revo-
lution in navigation since the map and compass.
The conception of GPS by the U.S. military began in the 1960s.
Satellites with extremely precise onboard clocks constantly send out
Ari N. Schulman is a senior editor of The New Atlantis.
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GPS and the End of the Road
packets of information containing the time and coordinate at which they
were sent; navigation devices here below receive the signal and calculate
the transit time and distance. By combining information from several sat-
ellites, an accurate and precise coordinate for the navigation device can be
calculated. In 1983, a navigational error sent Korean Air Lines Flight 007
into restricted Soviet airspace, where it was shot down, killing all 269 peo-
ple aboard; subsequently, President Reagan directed that GPS be opened
up for civilian use once it had been fully implemented. This occurred in
the early 1990s, when a network of satellites was put in place.
Just as GPS was coming online, digital mapping applications were
coming into widespread use. The first widely popular Web-based map-
ping application was MapQuest, launched in 1996; it also automatically
generated driving directions. The most notable competitor to MapQuest
has been Google Maps, which upon its 2005 premiere provided dramatic
innovations in ease of use -- as well as satellite and aerial images of the
entire world, of sufficiently high resolution in many populated areas to see
people walking down the street. In 2007, Google enhanced its maps with
Street View, which added panoramic street-level photographs of almost
all public roads in major U.S. cities (and is now expanding to include
smaller cities, rural areas, and cities around the world). Many related
applications have risen to prominence as well, most notably the website
Yelp, designed to improve online maps by uniting them with the kind of
information once found in phonebooks and travel guides.
Digital maps and GPS receivers were combined in the late 1990s to
create relatively inexpensive, commercial GPS navigation devices. Aside
from their obvious military and industrial applications, these have become
widely popular as in-car navigational aids. Typically, a screen about the
size of a small paperback book displays a live-updated map around the
user's current location, along with instructions on how to reach his des-
tination. Global sales of purpose-built GPS receivers are expected to
surpass 42 million this year, according to industry analysts, while annual
sales of GPS-enabled smartphones are expected to reach nearly a billion
by 2014.
Digital mapping and GPS are just the beginning of a much larger
revolution in technologies designed to facilitate our interactions with
places and travel between them. But it is astounding how quickly these
technologies have changed one of the most basic aspects of our existence:
the way we move through the world. When driving down the highway,
you can now expect to see, in a sizable portion of the cars around you,
GPS screens glowing on dashboards and windshields. What these devices
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Ari N. Schulman
promise, like the opening of the Western frontier, and like the automobile
and the open road, is a greater freedom -- although the freedom promised
by GPS is of a very strange new sort.
No Signposts in a Strange Land
The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from
the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into
them. As for the peasant so for the pilot, dawn and twilight become
events of consequence. His essential problems are set him by the moun-
tain, the sea, the wind.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Not long ago, I moved from my native home of Austin, Texas, to the
Washington, D.C., area. Austin has its share of driving woes: congestion,
incomplete frontage roads, discontinuous streets with a single name, and
potholes that ought to shame a warm, prosperous city. Still, it was where
I learned to drive, so when GPS devices became popular, I never found
much use for them.
But driving in the Washington metro area is a very different experi-
ence. The traffic is so dense it would have made Kerouac abandon his car
for the subway. Even when the roads are clear, the layout itself is laby-
rinthine: ironically for a city that began with a central, geometric plan,
in mid-navigation it is sometimes tempting to believe that the map of the
surrounding area was generated by tossing spaghetti noodles at it and
building roads where they lay. In fact, Eastern cities in general, because
they long predate the automobile era, are less than optimally designed for
traveling in cars. The problem is compounded by the inexplicable dearth
of road signs in the Washington area. At any rate, soon after I moved,
it became clear to me that, if ever there were a case to be made for GPS
devices, the Washington area would be it.
So recently, I got a GPS device: an adorable little thing called a
Garmin nuvi 350 ("nuvi" seemingly derives from "navigator"; "navi"
would probably have been too on-the-nose, and a bit too suggestive of a
certain moony faith). The touch-screen affixes to the windshield; when I
want to go somewhere, I just type in the address. It consults its on-board
map database, and in just a few seconds, the screen view changes to show
me a representation of my car as if I were following behind myself in a
helicopter, watching in special goggles that show a symbolic map of the
area ahead, with my route through it highlighted in purple. As I drive,
my car stays centered on the screen as the imaginary helicopter follows
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GPS and the End of the Road
behind, the view updating every couple of seconds. The device also relays
directions to me turn-by-turn: at every moment it displays onscreen
what my next turn will be, and as I approach the turn, a computer voice
announces it.
This setup sounds simple enough: like asking for directions before-
hand, only the navigator knows every route, and I don't have to worry
about remembering the directions or experiencing that stock shame of
pulling over and asking for help if I forget them. GPS particularly seems
like a godsend in a cluttered suburban outpost, where even a seemingly
simple one-step direction can turn out to be a monster. For example,
consider the instruction "take Arlington Boulevard to Leesburg Pike
south," which involves navigating Northern Virginia's notorious Seven
Corners -- a seven-way intersection with seven traffic lights, two levels,
150-degree turns into merging traffic, and signs that refer almost exclu-
sively to state and federal route numbers but not the familiar local street
names.
Thinking I can now rely just on the GPS's instructions, at Seven
Corners I discover just how measly they are: "bear left onto Leesburg
Pike," "continue right" -- but which left, and which right? There are many
turns within a small angle to choose from, and the instructions aren't
specific enough. And the screen isn't much help either: the two-second lag
time in updating and the lack of resolution below sixty feet or so become
real impediments when attempting to negotiate several successive tight
intersections. Even when I make the correct turn on my first attempt, I
immediately find myself in another intersection, and in the wrong lane
to make the next turn I need, because I only knew about one turn at a
time.
Similar scenarios play out again and again in the area's many compli-
cated intersections, particularly Washington's traffic circles. At Dupont
Circle, for example, one must quickly choose between ten different exits
off the circle, which is divided into an inner and outer ring by a concrete
island, each ring having two lanes. Maneuvering through the circle is a
feat in and of itself using one's own spatial reasoning and the paltry street
signage provided. But when I attempt to obey the GPS, it becomes nearly
impossible: the device just can't provide information detailed or fast
enough to reliably let me know which turn to take. Attempting to nego-
tiate the inner and outer rings, the multiple traffic lights at odd angles,
and the pedestrians darting in and out of traffic all over the place would
be enough of a challenge without also having to translate the lagging on-
screen map to the circle I'm spinning around.
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Ari N. Schulman
This sort of situation typifies driving with a GPS in D.C. It's pretty
easy and convenient to do when a trip involves only a few turns, well-
spaced apart on wide, clear roads. But just the situations that would seem
to make GPS indispensable in this area are the ones that make it most dif-
ficult to use. Just following the GPS in these dense spots itself requires an
almost hypnotic attention to it. But what makes this particularly vexing
is all of the other, non-navigational things that must be paid attention to.
Here, the lack of signage about street names and route information seems
to be compensated for by signs every few yards for changing speed limits
and special traffic zones; attending to all this to avoid breaking the law
is difficult enough, not to mention dealing with frequent construction,
closed roads, and pedestrians and drivers who each think they have the
right of way.
Even when (as is most often the case) I am able to correctly follow the
directions, I often find myself unsure of the current speed limit and my own
speed; careening towards the rear end of the car ahead and only realizing
it at the last moment; having to look around to take stock of where cars
are when I suddenly need to swerve across several lanes; entering a school
or construction zone without having realized it; or approaching a closed
lane or a stopped car with barely enough time to swerve or stop. Driving
in this way with a GPS often becomes downright hazardous or dangerous,
and makes me nerve-wracked. Instead of the best place in the country to
make use of a GPS device, it seems it must be one of the worst.
`Failure to Pay Full Attention'
It's just the danger when you're riding at your own risk.
-Dire Straits
The problem I've encountered in using a GPS device is one of which the
manufacturers are well aware, because every time I turn on the device, I'm
greeted with a warning that "Failure to pay full attention to the operation
of your vehicle could result in death, serious injury, or property damage.
You assume total responsibility and risk for using this device." This is
a standard disclaimer of technological apologists generally, high tech-
nologists and firearms defenders alike: we just make the thing; how you
choose to use it is up to you. Apropos as that claim may be for arguments
about legal culpability, devices are still designed for a particular mode of
use. The way GPS devices are designed to be used requires learning a
new sort of multitasking, because it separates what were formerly two
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GPS and the End of the Road
intertwined acts, or two aspects of the same act, into the two distinct acts
of driving and navigating -- which must now be performed separately but
simultaneously, in real time.
Attesting to this problem is the slew of "news of the stupid" stories
about GPS errors that have made their way through the press in recent
years. In 2009, New York state reported that it was cracking down on the
rash of truck drivers who use GPS to find new but prohibited routes and
end up crashing into low overpasses. The same year, a Swedish couple was
bound for the isle of Capri, but a typo on their GPS led them instead to the
northern Italian town of Carpi, one letter and four hundred miles away. (A
tourism official in Carpi noted, "Capri is an island. They did not even won-
der why they didn't cross any bridge or take any boat.") Another widely
reported story was of a couple who, instructed by their GPS, nearly died
on a remote Oregon road when they became stuck in the snow for three
days. Sadly, many other such stories involve fatalities.
Aside from the growing mounds of anecdotal evidence, there is some
research to support the idea that GPS navigation weakens driving abil-
ity, and that, as a 2008 review by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration put it, "the mere presence of a navigation system in a
vehicle might encourage increasingly frequent and unnecessary use of the
system, including browsing through lists of attractions." However, most
of this research only compares different types of navigation systems to
each other (and to using a paper map during the actual act of driving); as
of yet, there seems to be no research comparing GPS navigation to inter-
nalized navigation, nor are there any comprehensive statistical studies on
the effects of GPS on accident rates. But one 2008 survey found that GPS
devices had contributed to 300,000 crashes in the United Kingdom, and
over a million drivers veering dangerously while following GPS direc-
tions. And a 2007 Dutch study found that GPS devices increased traffic
accident casualties, and "purposely put the driver into a situation of unac-
ceptable social behavior."
In the popular attention drawn to GPS horror stories, the common
conclusion is that they indicate a woeful over-reliance on GPS. But such
worries are usually about what we are to do when the technology fails.
These are easy for defenders to answer by claiming, justifiably, that the
technology is still young and only bound to improve, and that this is no
more a claim against it than it is against cars, which also break down.
The more significant lesson of these stories and statistics ought to be
that GPS devices, as we use them, erode our judgment and faculties, mak-
ing us worse drivers. Consider the act of driving with the aid of a map
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Ari N. Schulman
or other directions learned in part before undertaking a trip. Researcher
Veronique Bohbot of McGill University has identified two basic ways that
people navigate. One involves learning the spatial relationships between
various landmarks and destinations and forming a sort of mental map;
the other involves memorizing sequences of turns, with landmarks serv-
ing as cues. This is an old and well-known division, but either alternative
requires paying careful attention to your surrounding environment when
navigating: you have to notice the landmarks, sense the distance passed,
and match these up to your internalized directions. These necessary
objects of attention in navigation, as it happens, overlap with those of
driving, particularly insofar as they reside in the same visual space. Paying
attention to where you are and where you're going is bound up in the
same general act as paying attention to other cars around you, where you
are in a lane, the curve of the road ahead of you, the presence of barriers
or pedestrians, and so on.
There is an idea popular in technophilia, dating back at least to
Marshall McLuhan, that some technologies may be considered an "exten-
sion" of our own minds or selves. Scott Adams, sounding not unlike the
drones who spin corporate techno-jargon in his comic strip Dilbert, has
said just such a thing about GPS devices, claiming that they are part of
our "exobrain" (and that this means that "technically, you're already a
cyborg"). It seems a rosy picture with a rosy appeal: GPS gives us addi-
tional abilities in physical space; therefore it extends our abilities into
space; therefore it is an extension of us, or of our minds or brains. More
precisely, as Adams puts it, "your regular brain uses your exobrain to out-
source part of its memory, and perform other functions."
Such a notion of an "exobrain," like most extensions-of-man ideas, is
essentially meaningless, as all technology "outsources" some functions
from humans and so in some sense extends our capabilities. But if we are
charitable to the "extended mind" claim, we can see it as an attempt to
articulate the peculiar way we use some technologies -- that is, we can see
it as grasping at the idea of instrumentality: the usage of tools that becomes
so intuitive that they seem to function as an organic element of our native
bodily agency. Using a device as an instrument contrasts with operations
that require conscious thought, such as programming a computer or
working a complicated control panel.
Among the best examples of such "extensions of our mind" are our
cars, which, properly designed and properly learned, can be operated so
intuitively that we feel as if they were bodily extensions of ourselves in the
physical world. This is a well-known principle among race-car drivers, but
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GPS and the End of the Road
the same is true, if less consciously acknowledged, of competent nonpro-
fessional drivers. Ask a student driver to parallel park or negotiate a tight
turn, and he will nervously tell you that he has no idea how far the car
extends in front of and behind him; but ask a person who has been driv-
ing for a while, and he can easily tell you how close he is to some object,
as if he were the car. Similarly, an experienced driver on the highway will
know at all times where the cars are in his immediate vicinity, which are
steady with him, which are approaching and which pulling away, even and
especially those outside his immediate field of vision; checking his mir-
rors before changing lanes should only be a matter of verifying what he
already knows. Without having to consciously meditate upon the fact, the
driver of an automobile learns to assimilate it, so that it becomes the site
of his physical agency in the world. He drives, that is, as if the car were
his own body -- and so achieves a remarkable though commonplace feat of
human instrumentality.
In this sense, the GPS navigation device is quite the opposite of an
extension of our minds; in fact, in adding a mediator between our own
actions and the physical world, it shrinks us back into ourselves, reintro-
ducing the division between the person and the vehicle, and between the
vehicle and the world, that is experienced by the student driver. When
we are constantly taking immediate directions from GPS, a car largely
ceases to be a vehicle of ourselves, in the sense in which a vehicle is not just
a means of transportation but a medium of realization. The car becomes
much less a habitual extension of our own physical agency and much more
a thing before us that we must command.
Driving's End
A couple of things America got right: cars and freedom.
-Dodge commercial
In truth, our trust in the American driver has long been on the decline;
the changes wrought by GPS navigation are only the latest in a long
series of efforts to crutch his abilities. All of the recent brouhaha about
"distracted driving" has deepened a growing distrust we already have of
ourselves as drivers, leading auto manufacturers to devise systems not to
make us better drivers, but to take more and more of the responsibilities of
driving out of our hands. The last decade has seen a proliferation in auto-
mobile features -- first in luxury cars, but now increasingly in standard
models -- that notify the driver of looming obstacles or if he veers out of a
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Ari N. Schulman
lane, or that will even automatically stop the car if it detects an impending
collision. Some new cars will alert the driver if they sense, based on brak-
ing, acceleration, and steering patterns, that the driver has lost his own
alertness, whether through drowsiness, drunkenness, or distraction. And
the next generation of so-called "smart cars" will communicate with each
other wirelessly, far extending the power of the car to direct the driver
and automatically take control to avoid collisions.
This attitude in traffic planning goes back even further, to choices
made in the design of the U.S. roadway system. A 2008 Atlantic essay by
John Staddon describes how, in place of driver immersion, the American
system emphasizes signage that goes beyond road labels to specify every
small detail of how drivers should drive. He argues: "The more you look
for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be
to traffic conditions. . . . A more systematic effort to train drivers to ignore
road conditions can hardly be imagined. By training drivers to drive
according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions,
the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs
rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs
would be dangerous." Moreover, "as cars become safer, drivers tend to
take more risks," and "often undercut well-intentioned safety initiatives."
While acknowledging the effectiveness of many safety systems, such as
seatbelts and airbags, Staddon proposes shifting U.S. traffic policy from
its emphasis on micro-directing drivers through signage to the British
system, which emphasizes and encourages driver attention and judgment,
and, Staddon claims, has a much lower accident rate.
It is necessary neither for cars nor roadway systems that technical
progress come at the expense of driver skill -- and neither must this be
true of the new technology of navigation. It is notable that, as detailed
in The New Yorker, the turn-by-turn system that has become the norm
in GPS navigation devices is in fact a technological regress, hearkening
back to the form of road maps provided to the earliest automobile drivers.
The turn-by-turn model neglects one of the greatest achievements of the
highway system: any long trip, no matter where the start and end points
or what the distance in between, can usually be described in just a few
major steps. In part, this is achieved through the system of route num-
bers: interstates, federal highways, state highways, and all the other roads
with numbers give the illusion that they are discrete roads, when in fact
they are joined together from numerous different roads -- many of which
were around before they were incorporated into a route system -- and are
better understood as guarantees of moving simply between major points.
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GPS and the End of the Road
One route number may span dozens of roads with different local names,
while any one segment of a road may implement several different route
numbers. It is a brilliant means of imposing order, comprehensibility, and
ease of use, of creating a system of networks out of the roadway's tangled,
ever-shifting web of concrete. Using this system, you can get, say, from
Little Compton, Rhode Island, to Boston's Logan Airport in just four
steps: 77 to 24 to I-93 to I-90 -- as long as you pay attention. But com-
puter navigation systems don't take advantage of this: Google Maps, for
example, breaks up the same trip into eighteen steps, varying in length
from 230 feet to 30 miles -- which is too much to try to internalize.
One can imagine a navigation technology that would group such
steps together, showing only the major necessary steps of a path, while
perhaps including the smaller street details for reference; portions of trips
that involve a few short turns or distances of mere hundreds of feet could
similarly be grouped together. Such a tool would potentially permit the
convenience of existing navigation technology, but would actually supple-
ment and encourage rather than impede and weaken our own judgment
and navigational skill. Such a program would likely be simple for even
novice developers to create using the public interface for Google Maps.
And GPS devices could be designed similarly, with the added benefit of
portability, to aid users in learning where they are driving, rather than
feeding them instructions from the dashboard. In short, such designs
might begin to show how navigation technology could work for us like
maps but better -- like running shoes rather than crutches.
But rather than nudging us toward greater independence and
reclaimed skills, the future of driving seems to point in the opposite

direction -- toward the sense that we are becoming obsolete as drivers, and
so toward granting us ever less control. Enter the dream of the driverless
car. The technology has made great strides in recent years due to competi-
tions sponsored by DARPA, the research agency of the U.S. Department of
Defense. And alongside this, Google has been developing autonomous cars
for commercial use and quietly testing them out on populated streets and
highways with regular traffic. Futuristic as it sounds, the major techni-
cal hurdles to the fully-auto-mobile have already been met using cameras,
GPS navigation, and artificial-intelligence software. The New York Times
reported in October 2010 that "[Google's] test cars have driven 1,000
miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only
occasional human control," with only one accident, caused by another
driver. Although most technology forecasters agree that commercial avail-
ability is still many years away, Google has already begun lobbying for its
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