I grew up in a suburban community. Nothing was in walking distance and everywhere I went, I was driven.
When my mom asked me where the roads were in our city, I listed all the ones I could remember, but I listed none in order and missed a lot. My mom was perplexed, she said “how could you not know where the roads are? I drive you everywhere.”
I think we don’t realize that the amount of control we have over a situation changes our memory of the situation. There’s no reason to remember if there’s no impact of knowing, despite being present in the same situation. I think this can answer why online classes are hard, why some students don’t learn from lectures and why there’s wisdom in the phrase “you learn by doing”.
Maybe I’m a freak but I always knew where I was going. I could tell you the street names and guide you turn by turn. What I lacked was knowledge of the side streets I’d never been taken down, or how to get from A to C without going through B. Or how to get somewhere new. But I would always pay attention to where we were going (partially because I get car sick); and I’d look down side streets and wonder where they went or what was down that way. And when I would move into a new neighborhood I would explore all the streets. (I still did that when I moved into my new house five years ago.)
Once I got my license it was almost like explosions going off in my head as I turned a corner and realized A is only a couple blocks from C, or Smith Road turns into Johnson Road and that whole thing is connected somehow.
The first time I drove my own car to the mall and parked it deep in the huge parking lot, I went in, did some shopping, then realized that I had completely spaced on remembering where I parked, because every other time in my life, whoever was driving took care of that for me, and I just followed them back to their car.
I'm sure there were times I remembered where my driver had parked, but until the first time I drove to the mall myself, I wasn't in the habit of conscientiously making note of where I parked.
To rephrase the title, “people who don’t do things themselves don’t learn to do things.”
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs I never knew where I was going until about age 15 my Dad got me a giant laminated map of the city and surrounding areas about 4’ x 5’. I hung it on my wall and it was my job to give directions. Until being forced to learn I never cared. The article is unsurprising. It’s like learning a new programming language, you don’t learn it by watching YouTube videos, you learn by writing code.
I was designated navigator on road trips with my dad from like 8 or 10. As a adult, I was surprised to see friends using GPS every time to get to their "favorite restaurant" (located a few blocks from their house).
It's a thing that makes ride share a bit maddening because it's clear when folks can't reason about their situation versus blindly following the GPS instructions.
Edit: Riding public transit to middle and high school helped a lot too.
This is why more parents should let or make their kids do stuff, like ordering their food at a restaurant. I didn’t order a pizza myself until I was like 15 and my friends still don’t let me live down how stupid I sounded fumbling through that phone call.
I believe that, I use a website called Citystrides that tracks my runs from Runkeeper and plots all my runs onto a map, the idea is to run your whole city, this is my map now: https://imgur.com/S3sTSml
Before a run, I will roughly sketch out my route and then run it.
Before I started I only knew the main roads, now I know areas I didn't know before, and I know a lot of the shortcuts and how everything is connected.
> In sum, as exposure to auto traffic volumes and speed decreases, a child’s sense of threat goes down, and his/her ability to establish a richer connection and appreciation for the community rises.
makes sense, intuitively. if you can go play and explore, the memories will reflect it. hide and seek, tag, capture the flag, scrimmages of hockey/basketball/football/soccer will take place. this is a fundamentally fertile area for a young brain to take intellectual nourishment from its environment.
Same here. Worst: if I walk with someone, the other person can lead me anywhere and I will have no idea how we got there. Funnily one time I met someone like me, we both realized after 10 minutes that we had no idea where we were going, having walked in auto pilot because we were deep in a conversation.
It's for the explicit reason I refuse to use it, basically. So I at least know the routes I take frequently and have a chance to learn new ones from time to time.
I remember years ago when I still used a GPS there were routes I would drive frequently that I couldn't drive without the GPS.
But what I really meant by the comment is despite living 30 years in the same city I barely know where anything is. Especially in comparison to everyone else I know they can all describe where things are via nearby business, other landmarks and adjacent suburbs and I am lost at to which part of the city the first suburb they mentioned is even in. I also have very little mental models of how one suburb connects to another. It's like each suburb lives in it's own isolate container and when I imagine it all I see in my mind is the main commercial area of that suburb.
One of these days I'm thinking of just using Anki to memorize my entire city and be done with it.
I always use a GPS, but I rarely set a route on it. I have a Garmin unit mounted to my windshield that automatically comes on with the ignition[1], and it acts as an omnipresent 3D map. This actually aids my understanding of a city, because now I know the name of every cross street[2], can recognise roads by their shape, and can see where I've been before[3].
I prefer a standalone Garmin unit over Google Maps because it's automatically present, it's actually readable, I can control the zoom level at will, and it doesn't use data / I don't have to keep offline maps up-to-date.
[1] I added a switched 12V outlet so I could get this behaviour. Many new cars are like this by default, but not mine.
[2] My GPS shows the next street as "Pine St ahead" in place of the next turn when a route is not set. Actually super handy. Also, all roads on the map have large, clear labels, so I can also see parallel roads, etc., unlike Google Maps.
[3] My GPS paints a blue trail behind me on the map, so once I've driven through an area, I can just glance at the paint line to orient myself.
Interesting. How do you visualise/perceive in your mind the routes you remember? Do you struggle with visualising other things? Routes I remember certainly have many mental visual clues like prominent landmarks/layouts.
Going back to a city I haven't been in for a few years, when things have changed, I find harder to navigate even when I roughly know the layout. I need to relearn some visual cues.
GPS only makes it worse. It turns out that interpreting an on-screen map takes a non-trivial amount of brainpower that should be directed into safe driving.
This is the opposite of my own experience. Not only am I not as likely to get lost, but having directions read to me means I can pay more attention to the surrounding landscape instead of things like road names. I can also explore without having to worry about not being home for dinner simply because I can always find my way back home.
Comparing my current location to maps in real time (or even alter on when I look at where I've been that day) helps me expand as well.
And to be fair, interpreting an on-screen map takes up slightly less brainpower than a paper map. This is really important since I'm the type that can get my bearings messed up by going in and out of a gas station. I have no real sense of direction and have to work really hard to have what I have - and always have.
I grew up poor, and we had no vehicle, ever. We did a lot of walking. From age 10 or so, I was quite the explorer (didn't have great supervision, but I also grew up in a smallish city of around 30k, not a large city). I certainly am not the world's best navigator, but I feel like I can drop down in the middle of any city and get around pretty well.
When I use a navigator, I can't find my way back. If I look up the route beforehand and look at a map, I can.
When I first moved to Seattle, on weekends I would sometimes just aimlessly drive down various roads. I wound up building a mental map of the city that has served me well ever since.
> When I first moved to Seattle, on weekends I would sometimes just aimlessly drive down various roads.
This is so American. I don't know anyone in Europe who would aimlessly drive around. If you have to drive, you drive from A to B and that's it.
I can understand aimlessly walking around or cycling. Walking or cycling, you perceive the smells and the sounds of the city, you can feel the wind, the sun, the rain. You can talk to people on the streets or just observe them. In other words, you're part of the world. Driving, you're locked inside of your comfort box, perfectly isolated from the world around you.
In both Berlin and London, I discovered that exploring the city using the subway builds a mental map of the city that is grossly distorted. First off, the subway map of the city is distorted, secondly, you get a very messed up sense of distance when you're rushing through a tunnel.
When I'd walk instead from stop to stop, I was quite surprised at the distorted version in my mind. It was a black field with a circle of illumination around each stop, with no real connection between them. It took walking to fill that in.
I'd walk for miles and miles in London and Berlin, which was quite pleasant but I got rather sore legs from it :-)
I once aimlessly drove around using public transportation in Freiburg, Germany, when I was new in town. "Let's see where that line will take me". It was a fun way of exploring the city.
Unfortunately, walking doesn't give me enough sense of the city here to drive it. I take walking paths, which cut through neighborhoods or are separated by barriers. I do not take the vehicle-only tunnel under the city and do not know the exits there. I walk down roads that are dead ends to cars.
Not that I would aimlessly drive here if I had the chance, but that is more because of the price of gas and the fact that it is way more interesting to drive in the countryside. For clarification, I'm in Norway - Trondheim - and am American.
I drove around London all the time when I lived there. I'd do it at night, when no-one was around, when traffic flowed freely.
One day it'll be banned, and for good reason. May as well take advantage of it while it's there.
I walked and cycled as well. Exploring is awesome. I love chatting to someone and having them say "I live in X" and knowing where that is, how to get there, having common knowledge, etc.
That’s how I feel if you use GPS navigation a lot. When I moved to LA I used my cell phone a lot to get to places but after a while I realized that I didn’t really know where things are. Now I am making a point to use the phone as little as possible and I feel I have a much better idea where things are.
Not sure where you are in the world, but in most of the developed world things have never been safer. So, the answer to your questions is a resounding "yes". Yes, it's safe for kids to walk around their neighborhoods these days.
> Not sure where you are in the world, but in most of the developed world things have never been safer.
In the US cyclists and pedestrians are getting killed at a higher rate than ever before. Partly because 50% of people are driving huge trucks and SUVs.
Since you’re not sourcing that it gives me license to speculate that this stat is probably localized (the US is a big place) and not coincidentally to areas where people are also cycling and walking at a higher rate.
"too many cars and it was unusual to see anyone walking" means that he is in one of the developed world part, may be suburban parts
As a parent, he may be scared of letting kids out on their own because of all the abuses/crimes/accidents against kids - exaggerated by the media.
And then kids do not have enough reasons to move out and play in the neighborhood in a world full of social media, gaming consoles, and the electronics around them to keep them occupied.
Other parents see that there are no kids out there and they do not send kids out there and it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.
As a kid I remember being out for 4-6 hours every day with other kids and much more if possible. But as a parent, I do not see many kids out there and my kids ends up with very small amount of play time outside (that too mostly with parents) and it is already hard to get them out once the kids are glued to the electronics.
I live in Cupertino, near Apple HQ. Obviously you can walk around but I rarely see anyone do... and I generally have never seen kids unattended around here (living here for 17 years).
The west side of the city is a lot quieter, and it's not uncommon to see people out and about here. The entrance to the Hammond-Snyder Loop trail isn't the most discoverable from where I live, but it's just a couple blocks away and I see people on the train tracks near it occasionally.
In either case, have you ever seen a kid running around?
I mean obviously I know from experience and being a kid at one point that apartment complexes are overly infested with kids running around, but pretty sure given the year and parenting, most if not all kids under the age of 15 don't freely walk in the streets.
This is one of those things that I just thought was common knowledge. I forced my nieces and nephews to get familiar with the local bus routes before they we're old enough to drive. Having to plan a trip and look at a map do wonders.
I grew up in Moscow, and my family used a private car to get around the city. I always knew where I was, because I figured one day my turn would come to navigate the roads on my own.
I’m raising my daughter in Manhattan, the least car-friendly place in the US. Until we ditched transit and began driving everywhere, she had no idea where we were or in which direction we were heading. Nowadays she makes suggestions from the back seat regarding which road is best and which stops we must make on the way.
That, my friends, is anecdata; but so is every citylab article. The world can’t be described by a naive generalization that, ironically, even a child can see through.
I grew up in Toronto and relied primarily on public transit growing up. As a kid, I would have a good mental model of the area around a subway station but as soon as we went underground it was like a wormhole to another part of the city. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I had a good model of how the areas around the different subway stations connected with each other.
Did you rely primarily on the subway system before you ditched transit?
My daughter was mainly a bus rider, as the places she usually goes aren’t served by the subway. I used to ride the subway to work, but I haven’t in years since I’ve turned to working from home.
My theory is that traveling in a vehicle that is “on rails” (train or tram or bus - they’re all alike in that their routes are predetermined) removes every bit of agency from the passenger, and leaves them completely disconnected from details of the route. Passengers engage in conversation or bring entertainment with them that further weakens the spatial link.
Those traveling in private cars have at least some opportunity left to influence their trajectory or destination. “Perhaps you should make a right turn here” or “let’s stop for ice cream at that place we like” are both things that get said along the way. There’s also the constant stream of teachable moments supplied by other drivers in the form of poor vehicle control.
I didn't know the months of the year in perfect order by the time I was a teenager. I had most of them right, though. When my mother found out I spent a few minutes on the ones I wasn't clear on, reviewed them once or twice and never forgot.
There is nothing that everyone automatically focuses on and remembers when focus and memory are not required.
I'm in my 30s and I still often have to start from January if I want to know which month comes before a given month. Same with letters of the alphabet.
I bet we could help people regain some of this ability via video games. A lot of time people are fast traveling or following from point A to B on a minimap without needs to understand how landmarks and directions relate to your position. Anecdotally, I've found people like myself who prefer GPS when traveling to always keep the map pointed north have a better understanding of how and where to get from place to place because landmarks are also tied to a sense of cardinal direction. Many games offer this as an option as well. Despite growing up in a 900-person town, memorizing the Los Santos and San Fiero in GTA: San Andreas made city navigation later in life something I had already trained my brain on.
>people like myself who prefer GPS when traveling to always keep the map pointed north
Argh, google maps appears to have pushed an update which seems to remove the ability to use directions in this mode. The driving mode to me is absolutely useless as it only shows me which direction i am heading, not where i am going or how i will get there.
"Windshield perspective" is telling. Even with a windshield, it's a lot easier to see where you're going if you are adult-height and sit in the front seat.
Moreover, drives can be extremely boring: getting stuck behind large vehicles that obscure any view, sitting through traffic jams and delays, waiting at stop lights, etc.. It's not surprising that passengers may not pay much attention to them.
And it's not just being driven - the heavy traffic seemed to degrade the neighborhood in predictable ways.
Before I moved to the capital, we visited a couple of times on vacation. We drove everywhere, so while I knew most of the major attractions, I didn't know where they were in relation to each other.
Later, when I moved here, I took the bus and train everywhere, so I knew the rail network and various places in relation to train stations, but not the actual physical layout of the city.
It was only when I got a car and later started biking instead, that it all fell into place for me. It wasn't that I felt lost before, but my navigation was based primarily on train stations and rail lines.
I always had to hold the Delorme Gazeteer or later, run the Garmin, when we went on road trips, from the time I was seven or eight years old. I suspect that early exposure to maps like that is the reason I have to have GPS navigation systems stay north-oriented, rather than rotating with the vehicle's heading.
This was before in-car entertainment systems also, I suppose, so there wasn't much to do other than look out the window, so you'd pick up a lot of the landscape and landmarks as well.
I grew up in a small (30k pop) city in "rural" Missouri and had no idea when I was going when my parents drove me around as a kid. I got older and started slinging pizzas and learned every nook and cranny in the whole town. This was before google maps took over. It's cool to learn every which way to get around a small town, but probably not that important in the grand scheme. I'm happy to offload this computation to my smart phone these days.
I like to joke that Google Maps/Waze purposely route you different ways to the same places to make you helpless and in need of GPS so you will keep using them.
My girlfriend moved towns to move in with me. We both work from home, together... and I usually drive (newer, bigger car).
She doesn’t really know how our town is laid out. We joke about it but know why that’s the case. We’ve just moved. I think she’ll have more solo transit time here.
My son will have to fly back and forth a bit. He doesn’t want a car, so I suspect he’ll know airports and trains better than he’ll know the roads.
In my neighborhood, on a dead end street we would make cars wait while a hockey play was in flight. One more second please Mrs. Stevenson!
That same street is a ghost town not really because of cars but two things. 1. Empty nesters didn't move out and 2. The kids that are there would rather be in front of a screen then wonder outside.
If you saw a kid outside you would jump out the door and play. That doesn't happen like it use to.
I traveled with my best friend few years ago in South America
I was usually on the navigation and guiding us from place to place
When we went out for drinks at night he never knew the way back, or even which area we are
I beleive that because in his mind, I'm the one who need to guide us, his brain didn't focus on remembering places and elements on the way that can give him a clue about the way back
I must be the exception to this rule. As a kid I always preferred 'shotgun' and/or the window seat so I could look out and see where I was going. I think I must have been paranoid to always know the safe route back to 'base' (school, home, etc).
This also applied to when my parents took me to things like swimming lessons (in a suburb over).
It’s a fair point, I was felt like I was being teleported around as a kid. It wasn’t until I was driving myself until I started to realize how the different places of my childhood were connected in relation to each other. I would be driving down a street and go “oh, that’s where the Spring Training stadium is”
I don't believe this, I think some people are imbued with a sense of direction and others aren't. Some are only capable of following turn by turn instructions, they don't comprehend where they are in relation to anything.
My two older kids have the worst sense of direction I've ever encountered but my 3 year old has built in GPS. We were all in the car going somewhere one day and sitting at an intersection my 3 year old says "the Indian restaurant is over there" and points in the direction of a restaurant we frequent that was about 1/2 mile away. The 14 year old looks at me confused and I nodded "yes".
I work in a building that's rotationally symmetrical and the only indications of orientation are the carpet colors for the 4 quadrants. I'm consistently amazed at how many people will get off an elevator and have no idea which direction to go. I've tried given cardinal directions to no avail, some people are just oblivious to their surroundings.
I've noticed the elevator disorientation too. I'm one with a built-in compass and the times that my expectations are diverted are rare and quickly corrected. Because of my natural outlook, it's odd to me to see people often step out of an elevator and have to recalibrate their orientation.
Elevators can be confusing if there are two or more on both sides of the hall. It's disorienting because it's easy to forget which side of the hall you're on, especially if the corridor looks the same in both directions. Happens to me all the time at a friends condo.
I guess that's the point I was making about sense of direction. I have never had the experience but two of my kids get confused very easily, the third is like me and seems to always know location and direction.
How do you reference locations in buildings then? "Over next to Accounting" only works if the person already has knowledge of the office layout and only for one floor.
Facilities generally refers to areas of buildings by floor and cardinal direction.
