path: root/bookmarks/annals of the road.txt

---
title: GETTING THERE - The New Yorker
date: 2006-05-20T12:52:01Z
source: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424fa_fact?printable=true&currentPage=all
tags: travel, trivia, books, maps

---

It is a testament both to the early allure of the automobile and to the difficulty of travelling very far in one that, in 1907, Andrew McNally II, the grandson of the co-founder of Rand McNally & Company, chose to spend his honeymoon in Milwaukee. He and his bride drove there, from their home town of Chicago. The way was mostly unpaved and unmarked. In those days, there were no route numbers or state roads; in Wisconsin, there were merely old cart and carriage thoroughfares, whose primary purpose was the conveyance of food from farm to market. It wasn't yet clear how drivers would find their way around. Navigation depended, mainly, on asking people along the way where to go next—an untenable state of affairs, it would seem, as long as the drivers were men, which most of them were.

Rand McNally started out printing railway tickets and flyers, and then, in the eighteen-seventies, branched out into the business of publishing wax-engraved maps for gold prospectors and other hardy tourists. These were maps more of terrain than of roads through it. Still, Andrew McNally II had a sense that the automobile might enhance the way-finding side of the business, and so, on this honeymoon trip, he strapped a camera onto the front fender of his car and, at every junction—every right or left turn—stopped and snapped a photograph. He and his bride did the same on the return trip. Back in Chicago, McNally compiled the photographs into a booklet, with a little arrow in each photograph indicating the proper direction to take. The booklet was called a Photo-Auto Guide and was essentially a driver's-eye view of the way to Milwaukee, at least as it looked that spring. (Obsolescence loomed; a new barn or a fallen oak could alter the appearance of the road.)

In 1909, an engineer named J. W. Jones invented a device called the Jones Live-Map, which connected to a car's odometer. It consisted of a glass-enclosed dial, on which you could place a disk representing a particular trip. The disk had mileage numbers around the perimeter and driving directions printed like spokes on the face. As you progressed down the road, the disk would rotate, telling you where you were and what to do. Live-Map No. 16, for example, guided the "motorist tourist" from Columbus Circle to Waterbury, Connecticut (specifically, the Elton Hotel), telling him, at various intervals, to "take right fork at flag pole," "pass under trolley arch," or "caution for dangerous curves." A promotional booklet for the Jones Live-Map read, "You are always sure of your road. . . . You fly past sign boards at speed without a thought. You never stop to inquire your way. Right or wrong, all chance information is useless to you. You are as easy about your road as though you were 'running on rails.' "

Now that we have been conditioned, by experience or Kerouac, to idealize the open road, it may seem quaint that the dream, in those early days, was to replicate the surrender and effortlessness of train travel, where you didn't have to navigate at all. But, in some respects, the rail ideal persists; we've just got craftier about aspiring to it. Navigation is big business these days. Web sites that offer maps and directions, such as MapQuest and Google Earth, are growing more sophisticated; global-positioning satellite technology and the in-car navigation systems that rely on it, such as General Motors's OnStar and Hertz's NeverLost, are becoming ubiquitous. Geographic Information Systems, or G.I.S., may be the plastics of our time. It's not hard to envision the demise of the paper road map, in a generation or two, because a map, for all its charms, is really a smorgasbord of chance information, most of it useless. Who cares where Buffalo is, if you're trying to get to Coxsackie? Most people just want to be told where to turn.

Both the Photo-Auto Guide and the Jones Live-Map were precise and mechanical attempts to replicate the oldest navigation tool on earth: landmark-based instructions, transmitted verbally or in writing by a person with local knowledge. And this is what the new gadgets aspire to as well, flawed as they can sometimes be. They employ algorithmic calculations that seek to impersonate the friend riding shotgun who knows where he's going, or the bystander who can tell you what you'll see when you've gone too far. Before there were maps, as we understand them, there were itineraries, sequences of customized directions. Maps, to say nothing of the ability to read them, were the stuff of progress. To see and depict the landscape in such abstract terms, as you might from above, requires a measure of sophistication that the mere itinerary, with its blindered view of the world, does not. So it's curious that the current geographic revolution is in many ways a reversion to primitive techniques: it is a high-tech gloss on the lowest-tech approach.

The biggest change, of course, is that the Global Positioning System solves the ancient problem of fixing your location, so that you can devise a way to get to the next one. As the brochure put it a hundred years ago, "The Jones Live-Map tells you just _where you are and tells you _what to do then and there. The hand on the rim of the disk always means _Now." Being told where you are, however, is not the same as knowing where you are.___

In the fifteenth century, Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince, presided over a court in Sagres that became a center for cartographers, instrument-makers, and explorers, whose expeditions he sponsored. Seafarers returning to Sagres from the west coast of Africa reported their discoveries, and new maps were produced, extending the reaches of the known world, which in those days did not go much beyond Cape Verde. These maps became very valuable, owing to their utility in trade, war, and soul-saving, and were jealously guarded as state secrets.

The latter-day equivalent is a company called Navteq. It is the leading provider of geographic data to the Internet mapping sites and the personal-navigation industry—the boiler room of the where-you-are-and-what-to-do business. Its only real competitor is a Belgian company called Tele Atlas. Most of the Web sites, car manufacturers, and gizmo-makers—anyone involved in what are known as intelligent transportation systems—get the bulk of their raw material from these two companies. The clients differ mainly in how they choose to present the data. This allows civilians to have preferences. For example, in the recent "Saturday Night Live" mock-rap video "Lazy Sunday" two guys seeking "the dopest route" from the West Village to the Upper West Side consider using Yahoo! Maps:




"I prefer MapQuest!"

"That's a good one, too."

"Google Maps is the best."

"True dat."

"Double true!"




Despite the digitization of maps and the satellites circling the earth, the cartographic revolution still relies heavily on fresh observations made by people. Navteq, like Prince Henry, produces updates periodically (usually four times a year) for its corporate clients. Its explorers are its geographic analysts, whose job is to go onto the roads to make sure everything that it says about those roads is true—to check the old routes and record the new ones. The practice is called ground-truthing. They drive around and take note of what they call "attributes," anything of significance to a traveller seeking his way. A road segment can have a hundred and sixty attributes, everything from a speed limit to a drawbridge, an on-ramp, or a prohibition against U-turns. New signs, new roads, new exits, new rules: if such alterations go uncollected by Navteq, the traveller, relying on a device or a map produced by one of Navteq's clients, might well get lost or confused enough to be "fit for Muldoon's Asylum," as the Jones Live-Map brochure put it, in an early acknowledgment of the anguish of being lost in an automobile. ("It's his for the violent ward, straight and sure.") A driver making a simple left turn—say, from Broadway onto Forty-second Street—encounters a blizzard of attributes: one-way, speed limit, crosswalk, traffic light, street sign, turn restriction, two-way, hydrant.

Navteq has about six hundred field researchers and offices in twenty-three countries. There are nine field researchers in the New York metropolitan area. One morning this fall, I went out with a pair of them, Chris Arcari and Shovie Singh. They picked me up on Forty-second Street, in a white S.U.V., after making that unextraordinary left off Broadway. "We're going to be working over by LaGuardia Airport," Arcari said. "One of the items we need to check out is some street names. They've put up new signs. Then we'll proceed to an area that we have targeted." Arcari, who is thirty-seven and was brought up on Long Island, was the senior member of the team, and he tended to speak in the formal, euphemistic manner of a police officer testifying in court. He'd been with Navteq for ten years. Singh, a native of Trinidad who grew up in Queens, was a new hire. He'd got hooked on geography after taking some classes in the subject in college.

They were, you might say, free-driving—no navigation device or map—being not only locals but also professionals in the arcane and endlessly fascinating tri-state-area discipline of getting from here to there. They spend two to three days a week just driving around. Manhattan's grid may be the easiest road network to master in the developed world (if we overlook the nuances), yet the routes leading to and from it are as tricky as the tributaries of the Amazon. (One of the things you notice, as you approach New York City, is that there are almost no signs saying "Manhattan." Instead, the traveller is introduced to such notions as "Mosholu" and "Major Deegan.") The highways are a mad thatch of interstates, parkways, boulevards, and spurs, plus river crossings galore, each with its own virtues and idiosyncrasies. There are many ways to get from point A to point B in New York, and, because of all the permutations, anyone can be a route-selection expert, or at least an enthusiast. Family gatherings inevitably feature a clutch of relatives eating cocktail nuts and arguing over the merits of various exits and shortcuts. So it was that I found myself muttering a bit when Arcari chose to take the Queensboro Bridge and maneuver through the streets of Queens to get to the Long Island Expressway and then the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Clearly, the way to get to LaGuardia, tolls aside, is either (a) the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or (b) the F.D.R. Drive up to the Triborough Bridge. Arcari disagreed. "The F.D.R. Drive can be hit or miss," he said. "At times, in the middle of the day, I have sat there for extended periods." Perhaps, but after merging onto the B.Q.E. we sat there for extended periods as well.

As we inched forward, we began to talk of our favorite and least favorite road segments. Whatever our differences, we agreed that the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a deep, eternally sluggish river of brake lights and diesel exhaust coursing through a waste of twisted rebar and abandoned scrap, is as gruesome a stretch of highway as exists in these parts. Its horrors, however, are invisible to the likes of MapQuest.

Eventually, we pulled into a gas station near the airport. Singh and Arcari mounted a G.P.S. antenna, shaped like a giant mushroom, on the roof of the car, and connected a laptop to it, upon which a map would show our progress, a G.P.S. track "like a birdseed trail." Though we were within rocket-launcher distance of the runways and were assembling some suspicious-looking hardware, no one paid us any mind.

Singh bought a Red Bull and took the wheel. Arcari sat in back with the laptop, ready to note any changes in what they called the "geometry" of the roads.

"Whenever you're ready, Shovie," he said.

The first thing the men noticed was a "No Left Turn" sign out of the gas station. "That doesn't go in the database," Arcari said. "That's unofficial geometry, since it pertains to a private enterprise."

An analyst has some leeway in proposing recon missions in his territory. "The situation at LaGuardia was something I had noticed myself and thought should be revisited," Arcari explained. In his free time, he'd been driving past the airport and, nudged by curiosity, if not conscience, had made a little detour, discovering that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, had put up a few new road signs. This was the situation at LaGuardia.

"We'll circle around the perimeter and then check the terminals," Arcari said. "As we're driving, I'm checking our geometry against what exists in reality." Left on Runway Drive ("drop a name check"), merge onto LaGuardia Road (another name check), left onto Delta Arrivals Road. The sign for it was new. "A valid unnamed feature," Arcari said, turning the laptop so that I could follow along as he recorded it onscreen. "I point an arrow to where the feature occurred." A few hundred yards along, there was another new sign: "East End Rd." Its short-lived existence as mere reality had come to an end; it was geometry now.

Seeing the road through the eyes of a ground-truther made it seem a thicket of signage—commands and designations vying for attention, like a nightmare you might have after a day of studying for a driving exam. Once you start looking for attributes, you spot them everywhere.

"Why don't we loop around again?" Arcari said. "I want to be sure we collected everything correctly."

The familiar frustration of going around and around on an airport road was ameliorated by the fact that no one was lost or late. After the extra orbit, we drove into Astoria, the neighborhood next to the airport. Arcari approached the neighborhood as a Zamboni would a sheet of ice, driving around the outside of the "project area," and then going up and down the streets within it. He observed that, driving around like this, you become acutely aware of how many people are not at work. Arcari said that one of the issues that have come up in New York in recent years is the naming of streets and squares for the victims of the September 11th attacks. We came upon one of them, James Marcel Cartier Way, and Arcari was pleased to see that the name was in the database. A kind of contentment took hold, as other anomalies encountered along the way—an unlikely median strip, a "Do Not Enter" sign—turned out to be accounted for. "This should be a two-way. O.K. Good."

Over lunch at a local diner, we discussed various attribute incidents. "One item that was an issue: on the B.Q.E., they started renumbering the exits. They did some but didn't do others, so for a while there were two Exit 41s."

After lunch, Arcari and Singh were due back at the central office, in Syosset, to download their findings. They offered to drive me back into Manhattan, but we agreed that it would make more sense for me to take the subway. None of us knew where to find it, though. Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile, promulgated by the makers of road maps of a century ago, whose mandate was to promote auto travel and, with it, the purchase of gasoline, cars, and tires. We pulled into a gas station, and I ran inside to ask for directions.

A map is a piece of art. It is also a form of language—a rendering of information. A good map can occupy the eye and the mind longer than almost any other single page of data, including Scripture, poetry, sheet music, and baseball box scores. A map contains multitudes.

For the past twenty-five years, scholarly discussion of cartography has been dominated by "critical geography," what you might call a post-structuralist approach to map reading. Such scholars as J. B. Harley and David Woodward, the late, founding editors of a gargantuan and ongoing project called "The History of Cartography" (Volume 1 was published in 1987; Volume 3 is due out in late 2007), began applying the ideas of Derrida and Foucault to maps, seeing in maps' myriad presentations coded signals about how we look at the world, or, more to the point, how the people who make the maps would like us to see the world.

The purpose and emphasis of a map are usually determined by who is paying for or benefitting from it. Web sites like MapQuest make money in much the same way that road-map publishers always have. They feature banner ads that direct users to fast-food restaurants, hotels, and services. Their maps become tourism-promotion documents. Personal navigation devices have their favored stops and "points of interest," too. As they become more sophisticated, they will come to know your preferences and needs and make suggestions—the nearest Jiffy Lube or Starbucks—turning G.P.S. into a sort of customized, localized Yellow Pages. Harley and Woodward would have been intrigued, though hardly surprised.

The American road map tends to be treated more like folk art. Its leading expert is probably Jim Akerman, the director of the Smith Center for the History of Cartography, at the Newberry Library, in Chicago. "Scratch someone who's interested in the history of cartography and you'll most often find someone who was into road maps as a kid," he told me when I went to visit him at the library recently. He likes to point out that he was born in the same year as the interstate system, 1956. The Newberry has a peerless road-map collection, in a climate-controlled vault—a kind of giant, fantasy glove compartment.

Akerman pulled out boxes of old road maps. Some of the earliest had been made by bicycle enthusiasts; a bike craze in the eighteen-eighties had engendered a movement, led by the League of American Wheelmen, to get the government to put up signs and to improve the muddy, rutted byways that passed for roads. Cyclists had also accumulated their observations of various routes into regional diagrams, which became a critical source for motorists, who, before the government got involved, had to cobble together their own routes. For good maps to exist, there needed to be identifiable roads, with signs. It would do no one any good to have a map in his lap if there were no signs on the road telling him where on that map he might be. Eventually, in 1916, the federal government passed the first of several road-improvement acts. State highway departments were established, and in due time roads were standardized. In 1926, the government established a system of road numbers—odd for those running north-south, even for those running east-west. Soon, gas companies and tire manufacturers began commissioning highway maps, from Rand McNally and others, which they distributed free at service stations.

Akerman also had some old railroad maps. Most railroad maps are essentially graphic itineraries, indicating where you get on and off, drawn not to scale but, rather, to the self-aggrandizing proportions of the rail line in question. They are pretty much useless for navigation. Pointing out that this itinerary model was similar to the one used in the ancient and medieval worlds, he said, "The other fundamental way of navigating is to reach an understanding by trying to grasp the entire territory in question. These are the maps we know. You see not just the single route but the layout of all the routes within the area, with some differentiation in quality. And it is up to the traveller to make choices about which route to take. This kind of map comes into common use in the eighteenth century. It's broadly associated with greater freedom of movement." When you navigate by map, he told me, "you are the one doing the algorithm."

To offer some perspective, he retrieved, from a vault within the vault, one of the library's oldest and most precious maps, a so-called Portolan chart of the Mediterranean, dating to 1456. It showed the sea's entire coastline, with hundreds of ports labelled in the manner of stations on a railroad map, the names neatly lined up parallel to one another, in the order in which one would encounter them if one were sailing along the coast.

"The tension between these two modes of navigating goes back to these maps," he said. "The itinerary represents space as one experiences it on the ground. A map like this has that element, but it starts to introduce the notion that you can conceive of it as a larger unit. It's a God's-eye view, which puts you in charge of navigating through space. This is the origin of the notion that you can pull yourself away from the world and see it from above."

The irony is that centuries later, when we have perfected the God's-eye map and become conversant with it, we have, in the thrall of technology, turned back to the ancient way: the itinerary and the strip map. OnStar and MapQuest zero in on the information that's relevant to reaching your destination. "They close down your choices and give you a route," Akerman said.

It can be amusing to see what MapQuest and its ilk come up with. They don't always work. For example, I recently looked to see how MapQuest would get me from East Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan to the North Shore of Long Island, an hour-long trip that I and countless other drivers have honed (with variations for personal preference, traffic avoidance, and monotony-breakage) over the years. Triborough Bridge to the Grand Central Parkway to the Whitestone Expressway to the Cross Island Parkway to the Long Island Expressway. Bing-bang-boom. MapQuest had an unprecedented suggestion: take the Triborough Bridge to the Bruckner Expressway and then to the Throgs Neck Bridge. From the Upper West Side, a few traffic lights west, MapQuest, snickering, guides you to the Cross Bronx Expressway and then to the Throgs Neck. _The Cross _Bronx? It would seem that the algorithms are new to the area. These directions involve a disconcerting degree of noncontiguousness. Why cross a body of water at its widest possible point? Why even mess with the Bronx? You may as well stick a sandwich in your ear before putting it into your mouth. __

Generally, MapQuest and OnStar choose a road based on their calculations of which will get you there fastest. The criterion is time, a function both of speed and of distance. They do not, as some people suspect, simply pick the shortest route; otherwise, you might spend all your time on side streets, stuck at traffic lights or goat crossings. The algorithms consider the length of a road segment and the expected speed of the road and calculate the time it will take you to pass along it. Every road segment has a "costing," a sum of the features that can slow a driver down. Turns, merges, exits, toll plazas, stoplights, speed zones: they all carry a cost. (Navteq has five "functional classes" of road, ranked according to connectivity and speed. An interstate highway is a one; a local street is a five.) These systems do not yet take into consideration traffic, construction, weather, time of day, or one's tendency, on certain roads, to go faster than the speed limit.

There are features that we associate with maps or navigation which have little bearing on the kind of road directions favored by MapQuest and OnStar. Traditional visual landmarks—flagpole, river bend, stone church—are hardly recognized. And a road that traverses water (i.e., a bridge) is no different from one that cuts through a golf course or a drug-free school zone if the speed limit is the same. This is why the Throgs Neck looks more reasonable to an algorithm, even if to a driver that extra water crossing may mean another toll and greater potential for bottleneck traffic.

With MapQuest, you can either look at a map, presented in a manner that makes your route the center of the world, or you can get an itinerary. But, since MapQuest's directions are derived from looking at a route on a map, the advice it gives is based mostly on map reality, not driver reality. Traditionally, verbal directions capture the experience of driving on the road, much as the McNally Photo-Auto Guide did; MapQuest captures that of plotting the route, from a God's-eye view. This is why, for instance, MapQuest will identify a short stretch of road—an off-ramp, a connector—that to the traveller would normally be negligible (without mentioning that you should keep the river or the graveyard on your right). Whether a segment is 0.1 or two thousand miles long, it is given equal billing. This sometimes has a ludicrous effect. For example, Google's directions for leaving Spokane, Washington: "Head north from N. Lincoln St., go 33 feet. Turn left at W. Main Ave., go 0.1 mi. Turn left at W. Spokane Falls Blvd., go 127 feet." Certainly, once someone following this kind of itinerary loses his way he has no idea where he is, because he has no sense of how the directions he's following fit into the larger picture.

Most navigation devices in cars display your route on a small dashboard screen; the settings can be altered, but more often than not the top of the display represents the direction in which you are moving. The onscreen map, in other words, is not oriented north-south, like a paper map. The map constantly readjusts itself, so that the road ahead is up. This is a boon to people who may be disinclined to see the ground in terms of north-south—people who when standing on a street corner will hold a paper map and turn it so that what is in front of them on the ground is also in front of them (above them) on the map. As to the age-old and oft-debated question of whether women are more apt to do this than men—of whether geographic proficiency correlates to one gender or the other—there is a great deal of straight-faced academic research. Suffice it to say that the scholarship is inconclusive, though it does tend to find that men and women, whether by nature or by nurture, perceive space differently.

At any rate, the in-car map displays generally represent small swatches of land, your immediate surroundings. You can zoom in and zoom out, but the area you're passing through is a disembodied square, free of the context of the larger landmass. For example, as you pass along the Bruckner, on your way to the Throgs Neck, you see a web of lines, and words like "Port Morris" and "Hunts Point." What you tend not to see is where the Bruckner and the Bronx fit into the bigger picture—the Bronx poised like a catcher's mitt between the legs of Manhattan and Long Island, the southernmost wedge of New York State mainland breaking up into an archipelago. You do not see, in other words, how taking the Throgs Neck might appear, on a standard map, to be a detour.

In the spirit of fair-mindedness, I tried this route one Saturday morning, when there would likely be little traffic to corrupt the results of the experiment. The affront to both habit and the inner compass—every fibre crying out, "Turn east, east!"—was especially acute as, per MapQuest, I followed signs directing me to New England, instead of to Long Island. So was the unpleasant prospect of paying the additional toll of four-fifty that the Throgs Neck would require: a deal-breaker, especially if you're one of those people who plot routes primarily on the basis of toll avoidance. (You know the type: he loves the Macombs Dam Bridge.) Still, I stayed with it. The road was clear and fast, the prospect—Rikers Island, from the north!—refreshing. As the Throgs Neck Bridge conveyed me onto Long Island, and I rejoined the usual route, on the Cross Island Parkway, I noted, on the digital clock on the dash, that I'd made great time. Perhaps this way was a minute or two longer. Hardly more. Over the years, those minutes, not to mention the toll payments, could add up, but still: MapQuest's algorithms had apparently opened an iconoclastic alternate route, a Long Island commuter's Northwest Passage.

Chicago, you might say, is the Sagres of the American imperium, a hub of geographic and cartographic expertise. This is due mainly to Chicago's role, in the nineteenth century, as a major railroad center. Rand McNally ("to maps what Jell-O is to gelatine," as Akerman said) was based there (it is now just up the pike, in Skokie), as were many other prominent map publishers. The University of Chicago had, until recently, one of the best geography departments, and is still a leading publisher of scholarly books on geography and cartography.

Navteq (the name is a contraction of Navigation Technologies) started life in 1985, in Silicon Valley, and moved to Chicago in 1997. Its revenues have tripled since 2002, amid the digital mapping boom. It occupies an ever-expanding suite of offices on an immense floor of the Merchandise Mart, one of the largest commercial buildings in the world. It would be wise, when visiting Navteq, to bring bread crumbs or a handheld G.P.S. to keep from getting lost. One morning this fall, in a conference room I'm sure I could never find again, I met Judson Green, the company's C.E.O., and Salahuddin Khan, a senior vice-president, who supervises the complicated task of converting raw data, including the observations of analysts like Arcari and Singh, into lefts and rights. Navteq is as much a collator of information as a collector of it. The raw information comes from a variety of sources, including the government—for example, from what are known as TIGER files, prepared by the Census Bureau. This information is in the public domain. A lot of it is out of date, idiosyncratic, incompatible, and, at the very least, requires cleaning up. Digital aerial photography is used as well.

The existing data, from the government and other sources, had not been collected with way-finding in mind, so it was necessary to look at the world again through the eyes of a driver, instead of those of a tax collector or a land surveyor—"to add all the attributes no one ever thought to add because they weren't thinking of navigation in the first place," Khan said. "Guidance, one-way systems, no left turns. Does something go under or over when you have two lines that cross a map?"

Khan, who was born in Pakistan, is placid and precise, with a neatly trimmed beard and a slight burr, a vestige of more than three decades in Britain. He happened to be heading out himself the following day to do a little ground-truthing in Wyoming.

"It's like news reporting," Khan said. "You could not do it all from Washington. You need to have stations and field offices in order to get that local knowledge."

Khan has three cars and a single-engine plane; being a pilot (and, by training, an aeronautical engineer) got him interested, years ago, in moving maps, in which the map centers on your present location—a kind of predecessor to the devices employed in cars these days. He began using navigational systems well before he came to Navteq, in 1998, and finds it strange that in this day and age someone would have a road atlas in the car. "Maybe that's a guy thing," he said. He is a self-professed "map nut," but really more of a gearhead. "Historically, I had what I would call 'lost anxiety'—anxiety about being lost," he said. "I then got to experience navigation systems. And I feel that I have effectively diluted lost anxiety out of my system. In other words, I've been conditioned not to be anxious when lost, even when I am in a vehicle that does not have a navigation system."

As he calmly summoned a world in which technology would do away with the experience of going astray, I began reassessing, in the rearview mirror of my mind, all the times I'd been lost or confused, angry at the map or the person next to me who couldn't make sense of it. Panic in a New Jersey rotary; despair in the pitch black of the Poconos at night; the shame, after you've got on the wrong highway, of hurtling past a sign saying "NEXT EXIT 13 MILES." All the rash U-turns and frantic attempts to get the attention of the driver in the next car—you give him the now quaint but still widely recognized "roll down your window" signal and shout helplessly across the gulf, "Where can I find Route 17?" Yours for the violent ward, straight and sure. For the first time, I began to think that one of those devices might not be such a bad idea. Even map nuts get lost.

What Khan was describing was a process of refinement. Over time, as the systems grow more sophisticated, the digital maps will come to look more and more like the world as it's perceived through the windshield of an automobile. Bodies of water, for example, are often given short shrift, because one cannot drive on them. Navteq takes note of "water polygons," as they're called, mainly because people are accustomed to seeing them on their maps. "Maps look very strange if they don't contain those things," Khan said. "There's an almost paradigmatic expectation on the part of consumers to see maps that look like maps." It will be interesting to see how long this expectation survives. As Green told me, Navteq is "revolutionizing the way people think about and interact with maps." He went on, "This technology is going to be pervasive. One thing we're talking about is potentially having digital maps inform the operation of the car. If you put a digital map in the engine of a car, you may have headlights turning in anticipation of the curvature of the road." He mentioned other G.P.S. applications. "A mobile consumer can get all kinds of questions answered," he said. "Where are my buddies? Where's my family? Where are my kids? Where can I find a barbecue grill within ten miles for less than four hundred dollars?"

After talking to Green and Khan, I was taken down a series of corridors to something called the Dynamic Content Operations Center, an embryonic attempt to provide up-to-the-minute traffic information. Two technicians sat before a dozen screens on which were displayed city traffic maps, with little icons indicating accidents and construction projects. Navteq gets the data, which it transmits to XM Radio, from local outfits. For now, Navteq keeps track of the traffic in twenty-two cities. Certainly, this system is an improvement on such blunt instruments as the periodic updates on AM radio, which seem always to report traffic on routes that do not pertain to your own—a reassuring absence of news, until you hit the afore-unmentioned jam. The Navteq method is more like having a friend or a family member you can call who spends all day watching the traffic cams on cable television, and not everyone has one of these.

The dream, in the navigation business, is that it will soon be possible to transmit real-time traffic information. The same technology that enables drivers to know where they are can, theoretically, be used to tell everyone else where they are and how fast they're going. An aggregate of that information will make it possible for a driver to know, instantaneously, how fast traffic is moving along the various road segments that he intends to take. Traffic will become, in essence, an efficient market.

The technicians showed me New York. I noted that traffic on the Throgs Neck was moving well but that there was an accident nearby, on the southbound side of I-678, on the approach to the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. There was something about having access to this information in Chicago that brought on a faint but pleasing kind of homesickness. Ah, yes, the Whitestone. I tried to think of someone I knew to whom this information would be useful.

While I was in Chicago, I went to see Kenneth Nebenzahl, a prominent dealer in rare books and old maps and the author of five books on the history of cartography. He lives in Glencoe, half an hour north of downtown Chicago. I went by taxi. The driver had no idea how to get there, and she had a fluid, if spirited, view of geography (she insisted, for example, that the Arabian Peninsula is part of Africa), so I got Nebenzahl to give me directions over the phone: "Take Lake Shore to Sheridan . . . go through ravine . . . do not cross railroad tracks . . . and if these directions are no good we'll call in the Glencoe Marines." I also had printouts of the area from MapQuest (which suggested taking the interstate), but they were hard to square with Nebenzahl's route. We wound our way along the North Shore. After the ravine, we got jumpy, made a premature turn, then tried to wing it, and soon found ourselves at a dead end. We put in a call to the Marines.

Nebenzahl is seventy-eight, a native of Long Island who dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marines in the hope of catching some combat in the closing days of the Second World War. (To his great distress and lasting benefit, he was deployed to the Caribbean, instead of to the Pacific.) As a child, he was obsessed with maps: when he was nine, he assembled a road atlas of his own by binding together, with tape, his collection of forty-eight service-station state maps.

He led me up to his study and began taking books and journals from the shelves: maps through the ages, a dizzying chronicle of ignorance and discovery. He showed me an image of what he considered to be the world's first road map, the Peutinger Tabula, a manuscript copy of an old Roman chart depicting the routes leading to Rome—an illustrated itinerary, really. He also had plates from the "Chronica Majora" of Matthew Paris, a collection of thirteenth-century maps of the journey from London to the Holy Land. They resembled pages from an A.A.A. TripTik, with little views of the towns and descriptions of distances.

Along the continuum of modern geography scholarship, Nebenzahl is a little old-fashioned; to him the maps themselves, and not just the information they convey, are worthy of study. He views the rise of digital mapping with a mixture of incomprehension, condescension, and sorrow, as a Brill Building songwriter might regard digital sampling.

"Geographers now hate maps," Nebenzahl said. "If you only give people a six-by-six-inch screen, how can they get a sense of where they are, or where they fit in? We're pushing the next generation into geographic illiteracy by not giving them a sense of what world geography is."

It was getting late, and Nebenzahl had to leave for a meeting of the Chicago Map Society at the Newberry Library. Ralph Ehrenberg, the former chief of geography and the map division at the Library of Congress, was giving a talk about Lewis and Clark and the map they'd made of their journey, a surprisingly accurate rendering of a large swath of the West, based mostly, as Salahuddin Khan might say, on nothing. Lewis and Clark relied on an array of methods and tools—a log line reel, compasses, watches, an octant, a sextant, a chronometer, a surveyor's chain, and Native American sketches of the terrain—and then sent readings back East, to be drafted by a cartographer in Philadelphia named Nicholas King. I imagined Chris Arcari and Shovie Singh, their white S.U.V. stuck in the mud at the foot of the Bitterroot Range: some serious geometry, a valid unnamed feature.

Nebenzahl offered to drive me back into the city. The car was new, but there was no navigation device. "I didn't want one of those damn things on the dashboard," he said. Before we pulled out of his garage, he listened to a traffic report on the radio, thought for a moment, and decided to take the lakeshore route—it was more scenic, certainly, in the twilight of a crisp late-autumn day. We wound our way through college campuses and elegant neighborhoods, admiring the attributes. Near the city limits, though, we ran into a jam. Nebenzahl sighed and said, "I should've known." We sat there for an extended period, as Chicago sparkled in the distance. ♦

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