After I got horribly lost in rural New Hampshire (the day after a blizzard, with six inches of snow still on some roads), I swore off Mapquest forever. I've never been fond of their directions, which always have too many directions. You know the ones....drive .1 miles and veer to the left...continue for .05 miles and bear left....and so on. It takes longer to read the directions than it does to travel a tenth of mile, and a more accurate instruction would be something like "take the left fork."
The straw that broke this camel's back in New Hampshire was when I found myself in some picturesque little New England town and stopped in the local quick stop for directions. I told them where I was going, and everyone in the store burst out laughing. I asked them what the joke was, and they said, "You must have Mapquest directions." I said, "Yea," and there was another round of laughter. They finally explained that for some reason, the Mapquest directions from Manchester to Conway (my destination) were backwards (left turns were right turns, and so on) for part of the trip, and everyone ended up at this store. I finally got where I was going, and discovered that Mapquest's 18 separate instructions could have been boiled down to three if written out by a human being.
But, like steak knives, there's more! I had to go to Reston last week to the Digital Cities conferences, and I'd never been to that particular hotel before. I did not want to use Mapquest, so I decided to use the new Google Maps feature (part of Google's quest to dominate the universe).
That also turned out to be a really bad idea. Google has much better maps on the screen than Mapquest, but they print out horribly fuzzy. Their directions were much like Mapquest's, but I gave it the old college try.
They were horribly wrong. They dumped me off the highway two exits before the correct one, and the last five or six instructions were, as I found out, quite garbled. Like my previous Mapquest adventure, a human would have produced instructions that were no more than three lines.
I'm frequently driving in unfamiliar rural areas, so I'm about ready to try a GPS-enabled map system, but I'm skeptical of those as well. GPS is not a wayfinding cure all--if you are lost, having a dot on the map saying, "You are here" may or may not help much.
The moral of this story is that technology is not always better than common sense and the human brain's marvelous ability to think. I'm firmly in the camp of those who believe that computers will never "think," and the map examples highlight the difficulty of programming machines to mimic human behavior.