Turn by turn

Posted on December 12, 2009
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Are satellite-navigation systems becoming more of a hindrance than a help?

AS A “mapoholic” since his school days, your correspondent has a treasured collection of one-inch-to-the-mile (1:63,360) Ordnance Survey (OS) maps of Britain, including many reproductions from the first one-inch series triangulated by Major Thomas Colby’s team in the early 1800s. A relentless innovator, designer of distance-measuring instruments, collector of placenames and the longest-serving director-general of the OS, Colby once walked 586 miles in 22 days while reconnoitring triangulation points. Apart from his prodigious map-making skills, he was appreciated for the sumptuous picnics he threw for his troops after completing a surveying project.

Since metrication, the one-inch series has been rescaled to two-centimetres-to-the-kilometre (1:50,000) and digitised. Although the good major—a stickler for clarity and simplicity as well as accuracy—might well have approved the additional detail thereby gained, he would surely have been less enthusiastic about the way in which digitised reference maps have replaced their paper equivalents. In particular, he would have been puzzled by why the scrolling maps in today’s car-navigation devices inflict such information overload on their users. ...

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