The Forgotten Art of Map Reading

Way back when in 1997 mobile phones have been just becoming component of my each day life and it was a handy gadget to have specifically as I had just bought my first 7.5 tonner at the age of 17 and I had started subbing for DFDS at Coggeshall, Essex. The one particular point I would never have believed back then was that now a days there would be a gadget in in the cab that would have saved me from learning  what felt like every single street across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex, East Sussex, Kent and last but definitely not least, Higher London. In my very first week I was provided a day in London with one thing like 15 drops across the Higher London region, nice. Oh for those who are not positive, Greater London is probably easier described as everywhere inside the M25 circle. So age 17, 1st week of owning and driving my very first Tonka toy and 15 drops across one of the worlds busiest cities, exactly where do I start???! 1 of the other DFDS subbies said “Don’t worry son, just get yourself a tough back copy of the Master Atlas of Higher London and you will be fine.” – I couldn’t have had any much better tips than that. So on the way down the A12 I stopped at a garage and found a copy of the London bible.

So just take this in for a minute, its 1997, I had X quantity of drops (& collections) across the capital, a list of addresses, not several with postcodes and TWAT SAT NAV was no where to be noticed. How did we ever cope I hear you ask. Pull up a sand bag and I’ll inform you a story. After upon a time you could cease at a garage and acquire these small paper paged books named road maps. You could buy them for counties or towns depending on what you required and basically they had pages full of the layout of your chosen location. At the back was an index with a full list of roads and estates and these were listed with a page number and grid reference so you could discover the road on the web page in the map, amazing huh?? Making use of a single of these town maps along side a bigger road Atlas you could pretty nicely discover any exactly where you wanted to go, all on your own with no 22 satellite’s guiding you down an unsuitable 1 way street! Or even better than employing the road map you have just purchased you could use what we utilized to get in touch with widespread sense, most individuals had a bit of typical sense as it was gained from parents and the college of tough knocks and hard luck. For example your honour Station Road, Anytown. 1st up have a appear on your map (if you have 1 of that region/town) and appear for station road in the index or just for the station. If there is no visible station have a appear to locate the closest road to a railway line, simple. Once again using a bit of common sense and a excellent map you can even perform out where an old railway may possibly have been. If you haven’t got a map you could often head towards the town and see if you could choose up the sign posts for the station. Or final but not least you could ask the neighborhood and they’d send you proper round the town and back to exactly where began and in the mean time with a bit of luck you’d stumble across Station road.

Now in London the streets are a a lot and the visitors lights and junctions are even far more. So possessing to hold an eye on your tough back atlas was very easy or handy so I discovered it ideal to tear the A4 web page out. See the photo above. Nevertheless an A4 web page isn’t so effortless to hold, so when you are close sufficient you can fold the web page to A5 size. Then finally when I was really close to where I needed to be I would fold once more so its little adequate to hold in finger and thumb. Please see my thumb beneath. I have to say that in day to day driving it was really considerably locate your personal way to your location, no typing in a postcode and stick to the arrows on your dash-mounted screen. All drivers back in these prehistoric times had to have a sound knowledge of the UK’s road ne2rk and most industrial towns and somehow we managed. In a preceding life as a transport manager I watched a driver heading from Ipswich to Leamington Spa take the A14, M6, M42, M40 to his destination. When I quizzed him to why he went this lengthy way round, I got the response “That’s what sat nav said”. Now call me an old stick in the mud but I asked if he had looked at his road atlas to verify exactly where he was going and I got a brief silence and then the response “I haven’t got one”. Not impressed I confiscated the drivers twat sat nav for the following week. Now I hope he has a slight expertise of the road ne2rk. Anyway I digress.

The beauty of a paper map more than a twat sat nav is that I locate I can usually see far more than I need to, which can only ever help you know where you are and what your surroundings are. For instance heading into London the other Saturday as a passenger I decided we would have a Map-Off. This was fine and a excellent contest and we each arrived at the proper place with no major dramas, but along the way I could check every single street I passed and I could see how far ahead the next turning was, with no possessing to wait for the 200 metre warning or what ever it is. Also looking at the map you can get some notion of what the road you are turning into is like or which way it goes, one thing which twat sat nav can not do very well. The one particular downside I located to the paper map is that it doesn’t light up when you enter a tunnel!!

I challenge any driver who is not a map reader to take up the challenge and try and get oneself across the country with no twat sat nav. At the finish of the day you may just find that you have some sort of new identified satisfaction in your day to day job. Twat Sat navs do have their makes use of and I for one particular do like that fact they can inform you how far you are from your location and I can never argue against the fact that some 1 shouting directions at you is far safer than reading a map whilst driving along or every single time you quit. My greatest fear is that the beauty of a excellent map is lost on all new drivers. Where’s the sense of direction that you all had to find the nearest sweet shop when you were a kid? Does anyone else agree that all drivers need to have an understanding of where about’s they are in the nation and what other roads are offered to the one particular your on with no aid from the NASA convention on your dashboard?? In the worst case we know that at 12 o’clock the sun is in the west and we want to be just to the right of that, so we very best take that tangent………………..

The Forgotten Art of Map Reading