A Pilgrim’s Digression

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, but I put it off until a confluence of recent events brought it to mind again. First, while driving to Pennsylvania to pick up her mother, two nieces, and a nephew and bring them back to Virginia, our GPS system utterly failed my wife and caused a brief, but intense marital spat. Second, there was an article in today’s Washington Post titled Why we hate our GPS devices. I think I have some insight into why we both love and hate these devices, and I think the Post article only partially gets it right.

My brother-in-law bought me my Garmin GPS for Christmas last year. He is a truck driver, and he had bought one for himself and thought it would be a good thing for me to have, considering the driving I do.

At this point we get to the “love” part of the equation. It is so wonderful never to have to do another Mapquest again. There will be no more trying to drive while reading directions printed from Google Maps. The fastest route to a destination is calculated by satellite, transmitted directly to my car, and spoken in the mildly computerized voice of an unknown woman.

Why a woman, I have never been able to figure out. My guess is that the designers of these devices are men, and thus are accustomed to having a wife or girlfriend give them directions while driving a car.

I love this device. Furthermore, not only is it useful for providing turn by turn directions to a destination, but let’s say you are in a city you don’t know and you want to find a good restaurant. The GPS can provide a listing of restaurants, categorized by style of food, within a ten mile radius (or larger). Gas stations, hotels–any type of business, really–can be found even if you don’t know the exact name or address.

Need a Wal-Mart fast? Type in “Wal-Mart” and you will be provided with directions to any Wal-Mart within the mile range you specify.

There ends the “love” portion of our tale of romance and woe.

The problem, as the Post article partially identifies, is “context” when providing directions to a destination. If you decide to make a pit stop or run into a detour, the device becomes quite bitchy.

“Make a U-turn. Make a U-turn when possible. Make a U-turn now. Recalculating…proceed .54 miles and make a U-turn. Make a U-turn ahead. Recalculating…”

I usually turn the volume completely down if I am going to be heading off-route.

The problem is that the device isn’t very smart. You can’t tell it, “I’m stopping for gas here so go on standby.”

Furthermore, sometimes the device is completely wrong. This is what my wife found out the hard way this weekend. She was driving by herself to pick up her mother and the kids in Pennsylvania, and she knows the route. But a GPS also provides quite accurate drive time estimates, so like me, she leaves the GPS on anyway, even though she doesn’t “need” it.

The problem resulted from the fact that for some unknown reason, the GPS decided to offer her an unusual route to get to her destination.

Now again, my wife knew the way to get there. In fact, she saw the exit she needed to take but the GPS was telling her to keep going and turn elsewhere.

Now here is the classic dilemma of the modern person. Do you follow what experience tells you to be correct, or do you listen to the computer, which everyone nowadays assumes to be smarter than the average human?

Have you ever deliberately disobeyed a GPS? You might as well turn it off because it is going to bitch at you constantly for the next hour. It is not going to self-correct and admit that you were right. It doesn’t “learn” the route you prefer. In fact, it will tell you again and again and again that you are dead wrong. You need to make that U-turn NOW damn it, before you drive another 1.3 miles!

So, my wife obeyed the GPS and soon found herself driving on a dirt road through a corn field. A farmer directed her back to the interstate, but first she called me, angry at the GPS and then angry at me because I couldn’t give her directions out of her predicament. I was not helpful. I was more than 200 miles away, trying to figure out where she was at using Google maps on my laptop. Soon enough, I got angry too, both at her and at the GPS.

Why did she listen to it if she knew the way to go? Because the computer is always right.

I know that too well. On Thursdays, I drive into D.C. and park at a $5.00 per day lot in Southeast, near the Navy Yard and stadium. Now I know the way to my parking lot by heart. My route does not require driving on the beltway or interstate. I drive on street level.

However, the first time I drove the route with my GPS on, it told me to go a different way. I thought to myself, “Oh wow, there must be a faster, better way to get there.”

That way involved I-495, and it was a disaster. The GPS does not know or care about traffic. I don’t even know why I followed its advice. I know that I should avoid I-495 during morning rush hour at all costs. But I followed the GPS.

Anyone with one of these devices knows the aggravation caused by sitting in traffic and watching that real-time drive time estimate tick upwards, minute by minute. The aggravation is made worse because you know, you know damn it, that if you had followed your own experience you would not be sitting here right now. But you had to obey to the GPS.

Before you followed its advice, you were supposed to arrive at 5:45 AM. But now, from the moment traffic slowed to a standstill, you’ve watched that time move upwards minute by minute. 5:46, 5:48, 5:50. Maybe you even left early, smug with the thought of how much time you are shaving off your commute. The time savings is dissipated in a cloud of exhaust fumes, but if you had just listened to your own inner voice, you’d still be ahead of the game.

And what’s more, the GPS doesn’t care! It doesn’t know or care to learn that I-495 is a mess during morning and evening rush hour. It won’t apologize and find an alternate route, available by taking the next exit. No, no…if you decide to go off route yourself, it’s going to tell you to make a U-turn and get right back on that damned interstate and park yourself behind the bumper of that Lexus in front of you.

I know that frustration, and my wife found it out for herself this weekend, as well. Her trip was almost a full hour longer than it had to be because she followed the advice of the GPS.

The Post article seems to think much of the frustration with the devices has to do with the voice, the nagging voice, but I think it has to do more with what is only glancingly cited: the lack of intelligence.

The article goes on to predict that future iterations of the GPS will be connected to other “smart” devices in other “smart” cars. Therefore, theoretically, the GSP could tell you, “Based on reports I’m getting from other vehicles, we should avoid I-495 this morning.”

If that ever comes to pass, I want one. I also want it to apologize to me every time we lose time due to its faulty calculations. I want it to be intelligent enough to say, “You know, you were right all along and we should have taken Route 50 instead of I-66.”

I want my backseat driver to sometimes acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, human intelligence is still the best intelligence.