Where am I? The GPS knows

Staying on the straight and narrow is easy when your vehicle's equipped with a tracking device. But is that a good thing?

By Theo Sands

Until very recently physicians' family road trips began like those of many Canadian families � Dad at the wheel, kids in the back seat and Mom fiddling with maps in the passenger seat. But that's all changing. Almost a quarter of new cars sold in Canada this year will be equipped with four-inch colour screens attached to computers that receive signals from the Global Positioning System (GPS). The screens show your location at all times and a disembodied voice gives you instructions on how best to reach the destination you've programmed into the device. "One kilometre, turn left," that sort of thing.

The devices add about $2,000 to the cost of a new car, not exactly small change, so the question becomes: are they worth it? "Absolutely," says a Winnipeg internist who has one in his new Lexus SUV. "It's an amazing piece of technology. My house shows up as a red dot and an arrow traces my progress. I can actually watch myself going by the local golf course, and the legislature and turning into the hospital. The golf course is green with splotches of blue, the hospital is yellow." All along the way the voice spiels out the directions. The vehicle's only a month old and the IM can't wait to take it for a long trip. "We're planning to drive to Vancouver this summer [he has three children]. It will be a tremendous help. No more wrong turns."

A Toronto Ob/Gyn who's had GPS for over a year found that he soon tired of the endless instructions and found himself distracted by the screen. He's since turned it off. "I use it when I go out of town but even then, not that often, only if I've seldom been to a place. I did use it for a trip to Ottawa last fall and it was helpful. Didn't look at a paper map once."

IS PAPER BETTER?
A Burnaby, BC family physician whose wife teaches grade five says his spouse feels that the devices may impede children from learning geography. He recalls the hours he and his sister poured over the Rand McNally Road Atlas in the backseat of the family sedan on summer driving holidays. "My wife may be right, half the talk in the car was about geography. We played everything from naming the capitals of the provinces to the names of all [then] 48 states. And the game where you name a place that begins with the last letter of the town or city named by the person before you, we played it for hours. She's got a point, I think, looking at maps in the car did give me a real feel for geography, even if it was only looking for the names of places that began with an easy letter and ended in a tough one."

Other educators with the same reservations about GPS point out that the devices are about where you are, not where you're going. The screen shows only the immediate vicinity of your vehicle unless you constantly zoom in and out, an exercise far more tedious than unfolding a map � even if they are difficult to refold.

Another caveat, those over 30 find them hard to learn and program � the manuals are typically three or four centimetres thick. Yet another downside: getting lost is sometimes the best part of a holiday (if only in retrospect), something that's hard to do with a calm voice narrating your every turn.

An alternate to a built-in system is to turn your laptop into a GPS device. A company called Delorme markets the Earthmate GPS receiver and software for about $175. Computer-savvy kids can get the thing up and running in no time and, say parents who've tried it, plotting a trip on the laptop is almost as fun for them as watching DVDs. That has to be a plus.