GPS is possibly one of the greatest inventions known to humankind. There you are starting to feel lost in your car, and a helpful voice tells you exactly where to go. It almost beats the internet, or YouTube videos of cats. It’s certainly more useful than YouTube videos of cats.
I’d be utterly lost in Dubai and Abu Dhabi without it. This may be a sign of my own lack of a sense of direction. Taxi drivers, after all, seem to get by without it. Or at least the majority do, the ones who know where they’re going. The ones who have never heard of Burj Al Arab, or Emirates Palace, we’ll leave out of this for now, as that is a subject for a whole other column. I do worry, though, that GPS is removing our ability to read signposts (or an old-fashioned map) – and even our ability simply to remember the routes that we regularly drive.
I’ve recently tried to start listening to the voice of my GPS while looking at the road signs instead of the little screen on the device. When I first learnt to drive, I only had signs to tell me where I needed to go. Surely it can’t be that hard to go back to that?
The voice option on my GPS is set to an English-accented lady called Jane. Quite simply, American accents annoy me, so with a few voices to choose from, Jane was the one for me.
There was another English-accented lady available, but she was just a bit too posh. There was also a chap called James, but he was never going to work. As a budding Alpha Male – who is probably more Beta+ – there was no way a man was telling me where to go.
Jane is now a friend of mine, of sorts. The problem is, she can’t keep up with the constantly changing road layouts, as building work begins and roads are closed, rebuilt and renamed.
I even went to the trouble of replacing the standard German GPS model in my car with a local one – but it is from Jordan, not the UAE, so it doesn’t really keep up with quite how quickly this country is developing. Perhaps a new, UAE-specific app to help keep track of which roads have closed, opened or appeared from nowhere would help here. I always seem to get to within about 100 yards or so of my intended destination, then usually have to park and ask someone where to go. It could be a lot worse, but it still irks.
This issue isn’t exclusive to the UAE. In the UK, when I was tentatively learning the route to a friend’s new house, my GPS would tell me to turn left, up a narrow staircase beside a church. This admittedly would have cut about 15 seconds from my journey time, compared with going to the end of the road, turning left, then left again. If only my car could fit up a narrow staircase beside a church.
It would then tell me to turn right down the same set of stairs on the return journey. Perhaps if GPS had never been invented, we’d all just remember where to go and there wouldn’t be such an issue? But it has, so we’re stuck with it.
Cases of lorries getting stuck under bridges that aren’t high enough to accommodate them, and people being advised by their helpful computerised friends to drive off the edge of a cliff, are also not unheard of in Europe, so it’s not a problem unique to one country, or even a few.
However, it is perhaps compounded here in the UAE, just a little, by the sheer speed of growth. Last weekend, I found myself barred from driving out of the exit of my own building’s car park, as a new aparthotel was being built there.
“You have to drive out of the entrance now,” my building’s security guard said.
The worry with that is that there’s also a new aparthotel being built on the entrance side of the building too. I just hope my GPS has factored in the possibility of levitation.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
