Am I in some kind of weird HN bubble where no-one has ever used a physical map?
I've travelled extensively pre-turn by turn navigation using physical maps, i spent a year motorcycling across mainland Europe in my early 20's using nothing but physical maps, I did the same but in the US during the early-mid 2000's.
Was it as easy as sticking a zip code into a magic box and having it tell me where to go and when to take a turn? Probably not. But it wasn't much more complicated because I know how to read maps and can remember things for more than 10 seconds.
I used a physical map, but especially inside cities how the hell are you supposed to keep your eyes on the road and navigate at the same time? A 30 minute drive can have idk 50 turns. Do you memorize those 50 turns? What about places where the street signs suck?
Lol... no it's quite the opposite and far less distracting to actually navigate by map. You read the map, interpret the relevant bits, hold (in broad strokes) the entire strategy in your mind, and then just drive. Most of the small decisions don't matter. In fact, this greatly improves situational awareness. I don't need to pay attention to navigating every interesection when I just read the map and realize that every road as long as I'm heading roughly east will dump into the big collector road that I need to get to. I remember whether I'm on one side of the freeway, or the other, and I can find my way onto it without any additional assistance.
Interestingly, it's often MORE efficient than using Waze or some navigation app with ADHD that can't see the forest for the trees. I pity those that never learned to see the forest.
I'm not sure it's an HN bubble so much as a people under a certain age bubble. Smartphones in the modern sense have only been mainstream for a bit over 10 years. The internet was only mainstream for about 10 years before that. But a lot of people seem to assume that we were hunting woolly mammoths with flint spears before that time.
Yes today's communications are nice but we really didn't need GPS or cell phones to leave the house however primitive paper maps and, yes, some degree of planning seem.
Well as a society we are super screwed if some event wipes out the internet or computers. The dependence is gonna keep increasing. I wonder when we'll hearing stories about Amazon servers shut downs inadvertently killing some people.
Less pleasant than GPS, sure, but by no means a rare skill or impossible to achieve. Would you get the road wrong more often, and have to stop and re-check? Yeah, definitely. Would you still get from A to B in roughly the same time? Yeah, definitely.
For what it's worth, my experience is the opposite. When I read the map and know the whole path ahead of time I'm far more likely to get it right the first time compared to using an app in the city that tells me to turn right 200 feet from the intersection when I really needed that information 200 yards from the intersection. Or sends me on some weird right then left then right thing instead of realizing I can just go straight.
I've travelled extensively pre-turn by turn navigation using physical maps, i spent a year motorcycling across mainland Europe in my early 20's using nothing but physical maps, I did the same but in the US during the early-mid 2000's.
Was it as easy as sticking a zip code into a magic box and having it tell me where to go and when to take a turn? Probably not. But it wasn't much more complicated because I know how to read maps and can remember things for more than 10 seconds.