Trial and error gets you where you’re going in Massachusetts.  Mostly error.  Here’s why.

THE CHALLENGE  The Audi in front of me is moving pretty slowly…not cell phone talker slow or flat tire slow or senior citizen slow, but slow enough. Lost slow. Driver and passenger both looking wildly about, left and right, while passenger brandishes a piece of paper…the international language of the lost. Mr. Audi’s predicament is obvious to other drivers but knowing that will not move them to show anything resembling patience, always a sign of motoring weakness, so Mr. Audi draws horns and furious glares from other drivers as they swerve around him. And, of course, knowing his own predicament has triggered Mr. Audi’s innate lost-and-clueless driving modality: strategically claiming as many lanes as possible to enable either a left or right turn if suddenly necessary, hitting the brakes every few dozen feet while looking hopefully (and pointlessly) for a sign, re-reading the directions scribbled on the back of his bank statement envelope. In short, driving like ass.

HISTORY: WAYFINDING & WAYLOSING
Getting oneself from one place to another—wayfinding, the academics call it—is as old as getting lost—waylosing, I call it—and, watching Mr. Audi, we must conclude that drivers have improved not a wit. In 2005, the average motorist got lost 8.5 times each week, and even more frequently when he or she was going some place for the first time. This despite the wondrous technology of maps, GPS, MapQuest, the Direction Following for Dummies series, and the guy in the toll booth.

When Americans first took to the roads during the bicycle craze of the late 19^th Century, it became clear most people needed help finding the back door, let alone another town. And, when citizens realized that the automobile would let them get lost in other counties and other states just as easily as in their hometown, the navigational brain trust went to work.

Nick Paumgarten, in the April 24, 2006, New Yorker, gives a marvelous description of two early navigational brainstorms: the Photo-Auto Guide and the Jones Live-Map. The Photo-Auto Guide was a series of photographs taken by young Andrew McNally II, scion of Rand McNally’s cofounder, using a camera strapped to his car during his 1907 honeymoon drive from Chicago to Milwaukee. The photographs were published as a book with arrows on each page indicating where to turn. Milwaukee was a honeymoon destination then.

The Jones Live-Map was a dial connected to the odometer on which you could place a disk representing a particular trip, say New York to Waterbury because, I suppose, people wanted to go there then. The disk would turn as the miles passed bringing preprinted locations and instructions for that mileage into view. Needless to say, choice of destinations for both products was limited.

Early motorist spent most of their time lost and asking the locals for directions, so, in 1926, the US government got into the act and established a system of route numbers (odd for north-south routes, even for east-west)making it a snap for hordes of eager, and lost, motorists hit the roads in search new sights, sounds, and picnic spots. Oil companies, states, and local governments all jumped on the bandwagon giving away road maps by the millions as advertising and loyalty promotions. Sadly, the free road map was the first of our filling station birthrights to fall by the wayside—followed shortly by free oil checks, free windshield washes, free air, and courtesy—when, in the 1970’s, paper prices skyrocketed, oil prices soared, and oil companies figured that, as long as we were pumping our own gas, we may as well pay for the maps, too. Motorists were forced to resort to tourism offices, call AAA for TripTiks, or just steal the maps from gas stations which, by then, had become QuickeeMarts.

GETTING LOST IN THE MODERN AGE: MAPQUEST & GPS
While motorists wandered in limbo, in 1991 printing giant R. R. Donnelley combined its cartographic services with spatial technology to develop interactive mapping applications. By 2000, the division had changed its name to MapQuest and been acquired by AOL. Today, it is the most commonly used web-based navigational aid, claiming to support more than 44 million daily transactions plus another 1.1 billion maps each month through its corporate clients (retail, real estate, hospitality, etc.) MapQuest is hardly alone: Google Maps, Windows Live Local, Multimap, and Yahoo! Maps all provide services for the lost, but computer literate, motorist.

Web-based maps were an improvement over the classic road map: you weren’t limited to major roadways, when printed they are smaller than the standard 1.4 hectare road map, when printed they can be folded in fewer than 46 steps, you get directions (not just a map), and, best of all, they are free. Still, web-based maps still presume adequate signage and logical or, at least, non-befuddling roadway design. They also presume that drivers can follow written directions.

Just as web-based navigation services began to hit its stride global positioning system (GPS) squeezed itself into the dashboard. A satellite-based navigation system made up of a network of 24 satellites placed into orbit by the DOD and intended for military applications, GPS was made available for civilian use following the 1983 KAL Flight 007 tragedy in which a commercial airliner was shot down after straying into Soviet airspace. Basically a classic triangulation scheme, a GPS receiver locks onto the signal of at least three satellites to calculate latitude, longitude, and track movement, placing you within 3 meters of where you actually are.

SO?  WHY ARE WE STILL LOST?
So, with maps, MapQuest, GPS, and your brother-in-law who knows the back way into Ikea in Stoughton, why are drivers like Mr. Audi still as off course as ever. Here’s my analysis.

A wealth of navigation theory generally agrees upon two distinct types of navigational knowledge: procedural knowledge, or route knowledge, and survey knowledge. Procedural knowledge is “egocentric” and is characterized by the ability to go from one landmark to another along a known route, but without recognizing alternate routes, such as short-cuts. Survey knowledge, on the other hand, is characterized by the ability to take an “exocentric” viewpoint, that is, to think beyond one’s immediate state and to assume a “global” reference. Survey knowledge is said to be a higher form of navigational intelligence. You can see where I’m going with this.

Wayfinding research has shown that most people can follow directions when they include landmarks (procedural knowledge), but, surprisingly, when given the choice, people tend to select shorter, more complex routes rather than longer, but simpler, routes (which would require survey knowledge). This same research shows that most people display poorly developed “error recovery” skills, and rather than switching to another strategy, such as stopping to consult a map after getting lost following signs, they continue to bumble along…..getting loster and loster (idiot knowledge).

You would think that GPS system would have it hands-down in such situations because it always knows where you are, but drivers, flustered after the third remonstrance to “make a legal U-turn” keep going while the navigation system re-plots a new route based on coordinates that are now miles from the intended destination…..by which time the driver has moved into a different time-zone.

It’s a lot of work driving like ass. You would think that the vendors of GPS software and equipment would know what research has taught us: drivers don’t follow directions particularly well. Likewise, a well-known postulate of Massachusetts driving which tells us “the statistical likelihood (X) of successfully finding a particular location in an expedient manner is a function of the number of previous attempts (Y) where Y is greater than or equal to 8” which essentially means that navigational systems become truly useful once we already know the way.