Ditto.

Traffic can be very heavy and very random in my city. You never know when a road is blocked.

My uncle was visiting a few months ago from overseas and I was driving him somewhere in my home town, and he off-handedly mentioned a different route he'd taken to get there in the 1960s lol

"How did you get here?"

"I dunno, I just did what my GPS said!"

Then he’ll say well next time take the 5 for 3.9 miles, then hop on 78 until you see the 420 then do a triple lane change to the 69 then you’re home.

Without even knowing where those roads are I see you are on the West Coast.

Gen X and prior used a lot of landmarks to get from A to B where routes were commonly used. Landmark navigation is still heavily used today in places like India and Mexico where routes change hourly sometimes due to road closures and accidents that gps mapping cannot account for.

I once had to drive pre-google from Paris, France to Madrid, Spain and then to Valencia, Spain with nothing more than a AAA Auto Club map and a Philips Road Atlas. Not fun in many eays, but it was an adventure.

"Wish I'd had that!"

Sadly it's almost never the case where people say "oh, life is better for you! Cool!"

More time to doomscroll

Studies have shown that using your brain to navigate once you get used to a route is beneficial.

Yeah GPS is equally about traffic now and not just navigating

I drove for a little while before gps was a thing, and I'm so glad to have it.

Oh my god when we moved from Oklahoma to a town in the mountains of Vermont this issue made the last day of driving hell! It's my fault for not checking the route on such a big trip though.

We had visited this town several times and always drove in on a major interstate with no issues. Well when we were finally loaded up with the 26' U-haul and towing a car behind, I just selected the default route to our new address in VT.

It was fine up until the last day when we started to get to the mountains and to my horror it was taking us on these tiny one lane roads up extremely steep mountains and super narrow roads.

When going downhill I was braking as hard as I could and the U-Haul was barely even slowing down and the brakes would be smoking at the bottom. And on the way up I was flooring it and barely getting up to 20 mph sometimes.

It's a miracle the truck made it through the dirt roads at the end. We finally rolled into town on what I now know is a historic, scenic route that the leaf peepers like to take.

I just like to have a little minimap following me like in a video game.

I use Waze whenever I drive, it also keeps me informed about accidents, cops, and other hazards.

But...what if the traffic changes after you leave?

Yeah, I always use navigation even on very familiar routes. Saves me time when there's an accident or unexpected event ahead of my route.

But I like watching the little arrow

Are we getting native advertisements on Lemmy now too?

Or do you just genuinely like it that much?

Same with phone numbers. We used to remember them, or at least a handful of the most important ones.

Nowadays it took me years just to memorise my own.