alt Hacker News> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.
Right. In the early days of Etak, the company that invented car navigation systems, I got a tour from Stan Honey. Honey remarked that they originally displayed the map with north at the top, and a car arrow that rotated with the direction the vehicle was facing, like a compass. Honey is into sailing, and sailors do not rotate maps as the ship turns. But they discovered that about 10% of the population cannot cope with a map that always has north at the top. So they had to make the map rotate. That became standard in GPS displays.
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1) Only 10%?
2) I can read either way, but with a road map what’s in front of you is generally more important than what’s behind you. By selecting the rotating map you don’t just get a rotating map - you get your position pushed to the edge of the screen instead of being centered, which means much more information is visible about the space in front of you. I switched views strictly for this effect.
So 10% of the population got to indirectly dictate how the other 90% do it.
If only left-handed people were so fortunate
IMO both are "best" depending on the task.
For getting an anxious or overstimulated driver from A to B, orienting relative to the direction of travel helps them not-mess-up by misunderstanding their direction of travel or missing their turn. It removes some information they aren't prepared to process anyway.
When the driver has more familiarity and will recognize when an important intersection is coming up, then locking North helps them contextualize the area relative to other major landmarks like highways, lakes, etc.