I was all set to cite this story to weep and wail about the state of education — for the most part I still should — but then I stopped to think.
‘Many people can’t find themselves on a map,’ laments Alabama meteorologist
“If I were to give you a blank map with no labels, no highways, just county lines and state lines, could you draw a dot within 50 miles of your house?” he asked. “We’ve seen some studies which show about 85 percent of the population cannot.”
Because here’s the thing. How many times, immediately, besides the situation at hand (weather alerts) does a person need to know what county she’s living in? Voter precincts are only a small part of a county. If you do your vehicle registration online or by mail, you don’t even need to know where the courthouse (or county services building) is. One exception that comes to mind would be jury duty. This is also, very indirectly, an argument for mandating county names on license plates.
For the vast amount of people who rely on GPS’s, and GPS’s built into their smart phones, and all those “location services” based on GPS or ZIP code, it’s not the person who’s doing the thinking. But there’s another part to it.
GOOGLE MAPS HAS NEVER SHOWN COUNTY LINES. In fact, to me, it seems Google has intentionally gone out of its way to avoid showing them. Only if you type “X county [state]” into a search do you get a shaded area, and then if you zoom in too far it disappears. Apple Maps has the same issue. The redesigned Mapquest made county lines virtually invisible and, when they are visible, render the names in small gray type.
So maybe, maybe, the first step in helping people who don’t look at maps all that often is for online mappers to acknowledge the existence of county lines. Beyond that, if large parts of the population can’t even pinpoint what part of a state they live in, there are some deep questions and reassessments to be made.