>You don't even need to have necessarily been to that specific street before if you have a mental map of the area.
I, for one, am not going to waste my mental energy making a mental map of Houston. The city PROPER has an area of 670 mi^2, which is equivalent to fifteen San Francisco's. The metropolitan area is over 200 San Francisco's. I regularly drive 40 miles to get from one side of the city to another, for whatever particular errand I need to run that day. The Houston metro area is officially over 10,000 square miles - that's larger than (pick one): Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maryland.
I'm not building a "mental map" of an area larger than the entire state of Massachusetts. Saying it's on par with the total area of the country of Switzerland would not be much of an exaggeration.
Maybe the city was different before cell phones. Maybe each neighborhood either had everything you needed or you just went without. Now, because GPS/Google Maps exist, the highest quality businesses pop up in super random spots around the city, and you'll never be able to have a clue how to get to them all without Google Maps.
"Back in the day" you didn't live in an integrated metropolis the size of Switzerland. But we do now...so the tools we need to enable that are now legitimately "needed" and non-optional. This very well may be hazardous to our health, but its not really an option.
I, for one, am not going to waste my mental energy making a mental map of Houston. The city PROPER has an area of 670 mi^2, which is equivalent to fifteen San Francisco's. The metropolitan area is over 200 San Francisco's. I regularly drive 40 miles to get from one side of the city to another, for whatever particular errand I need to run that day. The Houston metro area is officially over 10,000 square miles - that's larger than (pick one): Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maryland.
I'm not building a "mental map" of an area larger than the entire state of Massachusetts. Saying it's on par with the total area of the country of Switzerland would not be much of an exaggeration.
Maybe the city was different before cell phones. Maybe each neighborhood either had everything you needed or you just went without. Now, because GPS/Google Maps exist, the highest quality businesses pop up in super random spots around the city, and you'll never be able to have a clue how to get to them all without Google Maps.
"Back in the day" you didn't live in an integrated metropolis the size of Switzerland. But we do now...so the tools we need to enable that are now legitimately "needed" and non-optional. This very well may be hazardous to our health, but its not really an option.