Georectifying my mental map

2006-11-12 19:18 | Permanent Link | Locative, LBS

(Or, the life-changing nature of having a GPS and moving map display)

I don't know about you, but my mental map of greater Boston has been simplified to an abstraction that borders on the scary. Of course, I didn't realize that until I got a GPS and started using a Nokia 770 running Maemo Mapper.

Take the Charles River, for instance. When I'm inside a certain radius of Boston, the river runs from west to east in my mental map. So I was amazed the other day when I was driving along with the 770 nestled on my dash and noticed my track was heading due south! Sure enough. When I got to MIT, I took a closer look. Yup. The river meanders quite a bit, and so do the roads. I "knew" that. But my mental map doesn't account for any of the bends. Of course, if you look at the same map, Mass Ave runs northwest from MIT to Harvard Square. My mental map has it running north-south. (I won't even get into the part where I think parts of Newton are actually upside-down).

Maemo Mapper is really quite cool. Coupled with the latest version of the N770 operating system, Maemo Mapper plus a Bluetooth GPS are very stable. I used to have all of Greater Boston loaded up at all zoom levels, down to level 0. That took up about 400 MB. But I'm about to head on a drive from Boston to College Park, MD for a meeting tomorrow, so I had to delete 300 MB of level 0 maps. Now I have about 900 MB of maps covering a wide swath of my planned route down to level 2.

Which brings me to the life-changing bit.

Some of the things that have changed the way I do things:

ATM cards. Remember when you had to deal with Travelers' Checks? Or load up on cash before you went on a trip? With ATMs all over the world, I really have become pretty lax about dealing with up-front money planning.

MapQuest. They were there first. As soon as I realized I don't need to buy maps, instead I can scope out where I'm going and print maps to bring along, it really made traveling easier. I mostly use Google Maps these days (but just made use of a very cool Yahoo! Maps Beta feature that may sway me - did you know you can build up a route incrementally in Yahoo! Maps? It's really a handy feature).

And now comes GPS plus moving maps. I can see how this is going to really revolutionize my driving around. Of our 5 kids, three are still at home. They tend to want to be driven places. At night. Where I've never been before. I hate not knowing where I am in the dark and street signs in this part of the country are not the best. The other night I found my way to the football game they needed to be at using the 770 and GPS. It was great! I didn't look at a single street sign. I just followed the preplanned route. Of course, three games ago, the same routine led us along an unpaved road and we wound up at a locked gate on the wrong side of the football field because the map said the road continued on. It worked out ok. They got out and walked and I navigated myself out of there.

Which brings me to the next map. This is a Friday evening's worth of driving. Take son to music practice at the New England Conservatory. Go to MIT to work/wait for son. Pick him up. Attempt to get to Weymouth via Route 1/93. Traffic jam. Go north instead, get swept into the Big Dig tunnel (lose GPS signal). Barrel down Mass Pike, 128, and Route 3 to get to Weymouth before half-time so he can play in the marching band. Go home. Help son at Olin college pick up a car. Pick up marching band son at the local high school. Whew. Maybe it would be better not to save these tracks!

Here are some screen shots of the most excellent Maemo Mapper. The first shows the GPS Display screen (it shows full-res coordinates, I've just blotted out my house...):

This is Maemo Mapper's display of GPS details:

And the satellites it "sees":

Comments

2006-11-13 18:40 | Posted by Sir Black Maggot

Great post (I came via the Map Room blog). As a former Cambridge resident myself, I wonder if you also experience my favorite local geography distortion field, which affects most of eastern Cambridge north of Mass Ave. The best example is Cambridge St. between Harvard Square and Lechmere. In Cambridge, "away from the river" means "north," right? At least in my mental map it does. So when I'm going east on Cambridge St. -- parallel to the river in my mind -- I'm always startled when I enter the East Cambridge grid to suddenly find myself going "south" towards the river. It's not my fault that the grid is oriented about 85 degrees out of where it should be.

Years of biking along the river got me used to its weirdnesses (well, partly), but I never got eastern Cambridge to make sense in my head.

2006-11-14 07:55 | Posted by Allan

I have to admit, the part of Cambridge you're talking about is pretty much a black hole to me. The only time I ever went close to there while I was a student was to take the T to Lechmere to do some shopping. I lived on the Boston side of the river and the piece of geography I got very familiar with was the Harvard Bridge which luckily is nearly north-south.

Speaking of grids, I am still amazed when I go to US cities that have regular grids and find I can navigate by the street names or house numbers. Except New York city where they gratuitously toss in named streets to throw me off my stride.

2006-11-14 11:44 | Posted by SF

You wrote: "(I won't even get into the part where I think parts of Newton are actually upside-down)."

I thought I was the only one ever to think that!!! Where does that come from?

2006-11-14 19:18 | Posted by Allan

SF - I think for me it's the fact that going north on Centre St. towards the Pike is downhill. I don't go that way much at all anymore but it used to be part of my daily commute in the early 80's. I always felt like I was going south while taking Centre St. from Needham St. to the Pike and north when returning. Now I tend to avoid Newton Center unless I'm going to Johhny's Luncheonette.

2006-11-15 14:57 | Posted by Pat

Interesting post! In Milwaukee, you always know that when you are going west, you are going away from the lake. So when I went to visit Kevin in Los Angeles, I was always turned around, because away from the ocean is east, not west. I mentioned it to Kevin, and he said it happens to him too (even though he has been there for 5 years now).

2006-11-18 21:46 | Posted by Sir Black Maggot

Re. SF's comment: You know, I didn't register the part about Newton when I first read the post, but as it happens I grew up there, and -- here's what's weird -- it's always been upside down for me too, especially the neighborhood I grew up in. I still remember when, in second grade, I was first shown a map of the area, and I was really rather upset about everything facing the wrong way. (And it still does, I don't care what the maps say.) I have no idea why, there's no uphill/downhill to explain it in my case.)

Re. Pat's comment: OK, this is great -- that seems to be a particularly common problem for east coasters who move to the west coast. I live in San Francisco now, where the confusion is especially bad because we have the ocean on one side and the bay on the other. Anytime I have to make a snap east/west decision while driving, I go into this mental maelstrom of "towards the water/away from the water/no the other water/wait that's not the Pacific/which way is north dammit" second guessing, and whichever way I end up going is almost always the wrong choice. And I'm not alone there.

This has been a really entertaining topic for me. :-)

2006-11-22 14:14 | Posted by Reed | http://interreality.org/~reed

I wonder if the "upside down" orientation problems come from the way your house is oriented?

2006-12-08 11:00 | Posted by Andrew Turner | http://highearthorbit.com

So I assume you precached the maps of Boston? I recently found WinMapper - that preloads/stores maps of areas, and will be very useful for my travel to New Zealand.

2006-12-09 12:01 | Posted by Allan

Andrew - yes, the latest version of Maemo Mapper's precaching works very well. I can fit a really decent sized chunk of metro Boston at all levels in < 400MB. Boston to Greenbelt, MD at level 2 was about a gigabyte.

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