TransLinked

Human Transit: navigation: "turn right at the yellow shop"?

From the Chicago Breaking Business Report:

Digital mapping company Navteq has introduced a new navigation system that guides drivers based on the way people naturally give each other directions, with Chicago as one of the initial cities in the launch.

Its new system, called Natural Guidance, gives instructions based on points of interest and landmarks. For example, instead of traditional navigation systems that tell drivers to turn after a certain amount of distance, Natural Guidance instructs users to “turn right after the yellow shop.”

I hope you like the look of your yellow shop, because if you paint it green, you’ll be destroying your city’s navigation system.

Give me feet, or meters, any day. 

This post from Jarrett shows a remarkable bias towards those naturally gifted with spatial thinking — something I’m a little surprised to find given his stated interest in broadening the field to include insights from other areas. Given he memorizes maps, I guess that can be understood.

I have a friend (incidentally, she’s an opera singer) who navigates downtown Vancouver almost entirely by landmarks. While both Vancouver and Toronto have made things vastly easier for me with their grids, I think the attempt by Navteq to humanize their system is admirable, even if, as noted in the comments, landmarks change over time and no system will ever know what’s precisely in our heads.

I could imagine a landmark database that’s open to submissions, and the system might notify you of what used to be there for six months after the first time you pass by or something. It could even be powered through some kind of Freebase-like entity.

And there’d be toggle switches in the Preferences, of course, so you can say whether you wanted the feet and meters, or the landmarks, or, in my extreme edge case, both.

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