Thinkcorps

Wired Issue 3.12 – Dec 1995

Never get lost again, as geographic information systems usher in the era of intelligent transportation technology – smart cars.

By Tim Barkow

I am holding a two-page fax of directions, complete with street names and distances down to one-tenth of a mile, and I miss my turn. Drive right past it. Just keep on rolling through the suburban sprawl of business parks as I peer through the windshield for a sign. Each block offers another array of anonymous facades sprouting from landscaped hedges and manicured lawns. Everything in Sunnyvale, California, looks the same. After six blocks of backtracking, I find my destination, lock the car, and try to suppress my visible embarrassment at having lost my way using the most detailed directions I’ve ever had.

Not 10 minutes later, I’m standing before a great green Oldsmobile Eighty Eight that’s promising to change all that. Never get lost again – the phrase smells of a deal spun from straw on the back streets of Silicon Valley.

Inside the Eighty Eight, a small LCD is perched in front of the radio on an adjustable metal stalk. It’s my interface to a digital map that mimics “ground truth” – the exact geodetic lay of the land – with the precision to route me to any destination in any city I choose. My pick: Sebastopol. I’ve never been there -never even heard of it until five minutes ago. But in a few seconds, the computer is ready to go. All that’s left is to follow the directions and try not to hit anything on the way there.

Buckling into 2% tons of Detroit’s finest and letting a route-guidance computer play back-seat driver is a heady prospect. That street back in Sunnyvale? The computer wouldn’t have missed it. Audible prompts would have alerted me to watch for the turn, the LCD would have displayed my error as I passed. Simply put, I blew it. This tiny computer the size of a boxed pie – powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU and packing a mere 85-Mbyte PC card – had, without fanfare or even a sneer, outclassed me. After missing that street sign, that one small but critical piece of data, it’s now painfully clear that I am not quick, perceptive, or knowledgeable enough to drive in Sunnyvale. And that’s exactly what the people at Navigation Technologies want me to think.

Started in 1985 by Russell Shields, Navigation Technologies has grown into one of the premier suppliers of digital-map databases in the world. NavTech, as the company’s commonly known, is tackling a daunting task in the age of the high-tech information system: providing content. It is building a database of the road networks across the US and Western Europe that just may be savvy enough to crack open our Euclid-ean notion of location once and for all.

The database technology that fuels this navigational dingus is the offspring of GIS, or geographic information systems. GIS was originally developed by the US Department of Defense and found a home guiding missiles around the globe. In essence, GIS turns map into database, providing the foundation for digitally constructing and manipulating spatially related data sets: Zip codes, forest inventories, buying patterns, development plans. If it’s got location, you can map it. You can add as many different data layers to the map as you like. You can analyze it in a hundred different ways and, in conjunction with a GPS receiver, interact with the data in real time.

In 1984, GIS-based navigation systems were already being used in marine and aeronautic applications when Clifton Haley, the chair of Budget Rent A Car and a private pilot, approached Russell Shields convinced that mapping technology would soon be used in navigation systems for cars. After conducting a few informal studies on the driving habits of his software consulting firm’s employees, Shields also became convinced that the technology was right for the road.

But industrial developers of prototype navigation systems, the Motorolas and Rockwells, were having problems. Before 1985, the only major player in the digital-map business was Etak Inc., also of Sunnyvale and owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Born a venture-funded organization, Etak had its fingers in a number of different map products, but many developers didn’t think the company was concentrating on the particular type of map they needed. Notably, Etak was not building map databases with the necessary detail to mimic ground truth.

This was a problem. If a navigation system is supposed to guide you across town, you’d better be sure that every particular of every street is laid out correctly in the map. Otherwise, you might find yourself staring up the business end of a busy highway off-ramp. Without this detail, you can display the map onscreen and overlay the car’s GPS-calculated position, but you can’t compute a route. What you’ve got is an extremely expensive novelty, a rich geek’s road atlas. But with the depth of an extensive database, that little navigation system isn’t just another toy, it’s a damn effective tool for getting anywhere.

Heading north from Sunnyvale, I’m poring over the offspring of some 40 years of previously top-secret, Cold War technology, the fall-out of intercontinental ballistic missiles, global-positioning satellites, and a few billion dollars spent in the national interest, all wrapped up in a neat little package that’s going to find me a cash machine and a hot cup of joe in Sebastopol, California.

This particular manifestation of technology transfer is Oldsmobile’s GuideStar, a stitching together of Rockwell Automotive’s PathMaster hardware, Zexel Corp.’s software, and, at its heart, the NavTech database. GuideStar is no prototype – it’s ready to roll. Oldsmobile will offer the system as a US$2,000 option in Eighty Eights nationwide, beginning in ‘96.

The system’s design is reminiscent of the Newton and the Game Boy, only more squat and businesslike. A small patch antenna, 2% inches square and flat like a smushed biscuit, is mounted on the rear deck – the only visible sign that you’re packing a global-positioning-system receiver. The GPS signals continually update the car’s position on the map. When the signal is blocked by tall buildings, trees, or overpasses, a dead-reckoning system fed by positional and rotation sensors seamlessly takes over, relaying changes to the computer.

Of course, you have to be moving for the gizmo to be much use.

My first hour with GuideStar is less than spectacular. Crammed in mid-afternoon gridlock on US 101,1 bide my time playing around with the interface, switching between the easy-to-read direction screen – a big yellow arrow indicating my next turn, an agonizing 17.3 miles away and the map screen, a bird’seye view of my location adjustable from 220 yards to 4 miles across. The map view is much better for killing time: for 20 minutes, I stare down the little green arrow representing my car, which slowly inches its way along the blue line that supposedly represents a highway, that great American pipeline of people and goods.

Once released into moving traffic, though, GuideStar does its duty, relaying route information in its simplest terms: street name, direction, and distance to the next turn. This visual data is supplemented with audio prompts that break the silence in synthesized Speak ‘N’ Spell tones, a voice ushering in the age of the intelligent transportation system – the smart car.

The navigation system is deceptively simple. Putting yourself in GuideStar’s hands feels as if you’ve dispensed with depth perception and you’re cruising around with one eye closed. Jim Gilmer, NavTech’s communications industry director, says that at first most people are confused. “If someone were to describe it to you before you experienced it,” says Gilmer, “you might not understand – simply because you have no basis for thinking about it in any other way.” But after testing the system, most drivers come around. All it takes, after all, is the admission that a map database knows more about the road than you do.

This is the virtual reality they don’t teach you, the kind without the 3-D headsets. I’m reminded of a 1920s map of Dallas my father had hanging in his study. Concentric circles marked off distances from the post office at the center of town. Just as Dallas once revolved around its central communications system, today navigation systems revolve around us, tallying our precise positions, calculating the distances between us and the world. With the push of a button, the whir of a trunk-mounted hard drive, we have once again centered ourselves in the universe.

Asked what it is that excites him about this massive project, NavTech chair Russell Shields answers simply, “To change the way people interact with the geometry of the world. There aren’t that many opportunities for those of us who come out of the software and technology industries to make that kind of change.”

The 54-year-old Shields seems to be perpetually in the right place for change. In high school, he worked in a bank that had just installed its first computer and he ended up going to college already familiar with hardware and software. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, he ran the data-processing operations for the National Opinion Research Center and later the American Hospital Association. He completed all the work for a PhD in computer science, but had a little trouble finishing up. Sounding ahead of his time, Shields explains: “The first credit-bureau systems I did had about 10 million customers, while the professor was working on the alumni file, which had about 100,000 people. We never quite saw eye to eye about the theory on large databases.”

Shields never finished his thesis.

Instead, he moved on and in 1981, with cellular pioneer Marly Cooper, founded Cellular Business Systems to provide billing and processing services to the mobile-phone industry. Throughout his career, Shields has consulted on numerous database-related projects, including one for the CIA involving the storage and retrieval of data.

These days, with the smart-car industry in such a nascent state, Shields is a busy man. Standards are still being worked out, and as those in the computer industry have discovered, helping set those standards can make your company’s future. Shields is leaving little to chance on that front: he is a director of the Intelligent Vehicle Highway Society of America, chair of the Transportation Research Board’s committee on communications and member of the board’s intelligent-vehicle highway systems committee, and chair of the map database standards committee of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

No less impressive than Shields’ resume are his investors. NavTech’s backers represent a good portion of the growing roster of players in the emerging intelligent-transportation systems industry – Philips Media, which holds a majority stake in the company; Motorola; the American Automobile Association and the Automobile Association-UK; Nippondenso, Zexel, and Nichimen Trading Company in Japan; France’s Renault; and Italy’s EL. DA - each one interested in grabbing a piece of what US Department of Transportation Secretary Federico Pena expects will grow into a $200 billion industry by early next century. Though NavTech doesn’t expect to break even until 2000, its investors seem willing to spend over $200 million to reach this goal, helping to expand and improve the map database’s coverage and accuracy along the way.

Creating the sort of extensive database NavTech has in mind turns out to be less about business savvy and more about brute force – that is, manpower and cash flow. Inside the NavTech building, a digital factory is feeding maps into the vast database. Almost every inch is marked off with gray upholstered cubicles, tight spaces each with its own workstation. Large, brightly colored street signs are tacked up high along the walls. The atmosphere is strangely quiet, with very little click-clacking of keyboards. Incredibly, I find out, the company employs almost 800 people and has established more than 50 field offices worldwide, all working to weave their separate squares of the database into one massive patchwork model of the road.

Madeline Heiser, a NavTech research analyst, lords over the first stage in the database’s development, the research and collection of data. Her library is a maze of white metal cabinets, full of maps and photographs from almost every imaginable source. Even in the ‘90s, it seems, it’s difficult to get your hands on reliable information. US Geological Survey quadrangle sheets, each charting about 70 square miles, provide the line geometries for the database, but they’re usually old and, therefore, inaccurate. To fill in gaps and update the old information, aerial photos are collected, mostly off-the-shelf to hold down costs. The photos also help provide information on z-levels (the relative height of roadways) that distinguish overpasses.

NavTech rarely uses commercially published maps because of the expensive release fees. So the researchers have to dig. Water district and electric-power parcel maps are often good sources. Many of the field researchers have connections to their alma-maters and former professors who help ferret out hard-to-find information. And, sometimes, when off-the-shelf cartography is the only option, the company buckles down and forks over the cash. NavTech recently purchased 13 maps of areas in New Jersey for $130,000.

Other times, resourcefulness and ready cash are not enough. Heiser recounts the tale of the village of Long Grove, outside Chicago, which wouldn’t release any of its maps because, being a well-to-do community, it was worried about its residents’ privacy. “You let Aykroyd and Belushi in for The Blues Brothers, you can let us in,” Heiser protested. But they disagreed. Madeline Heiser, despite her charm, is no John Belushi. So, NavTech did it the hard way. The company sent out two people to drive the streets of Long Grove and record the entire area. It took two weeks of 10-hour days to finish the job. “Sometimes,” Heiser says, “you’ve got to do the whole thing by hand.”

After collection, the maps must be digitized. And while it might be more efficient to scan the maps, NavTech prefers to control which data it inputs – scanning the database is quicker, but you can’t be sure whether the topology is accurate. If it’s not, then roads that actually intersect won’t connect, and the computer won’t route you correctly. So, again, everything is done by hand.

The digitizing is done by teams using Environmental Systems Research Institute’s Arc/Info, the leading GIS software package available. Digitizing is painstaking work. In San Antonio, one quad sheet took a week to input. Twenty quads may take two to three months. One section of downtown Philadelphia had 22,000 “links,” a term used to denote a road length or an address range along a street. That was the biggest quad the geocoders have come across so far.

Once the basic road geometries are input and their topologies checked, the database is handed over to the geocoders. Everything from city-county-private area designations, construction information, street names and aliases, the text of road signage, z-levels, and turn restrictions is entered into the database layer by layer, slowly sedimenting into an intricate data mesh, a virtual reality of the road.

GuideStar demands this kind of detail. It has got to know whether there’s a concrete divider along a highway, whether two streets intersect or one’s an overpass. Often, the data is more complicated: jug handles, left-hand turns that loop to cross traffic from the right lane, are a fairly common feature in New Jersey. Every sign, every painted line, every relevant piece of information along the road has to find its way into the database. Each link normally ends up carrying three to four dozen different pieces of data.

The power of preset “points of interest” – banks, rest stops, restaurants – becomes clear once I arrive in Sebastopol. In real life, an ordinary mortal is not likely to know the ATM closest to any given spot, but with points of interest, the navigation system can figure it out for you. That’s the beauty of a database: being able to effortlessly reshuffle information into its most useful form. With GuideStar, I’m able to sort through ATMs by distance, find the nearest one maintained by my bank, follow the steps – turn right, right, left – and five minutes later I’m liquid again.

But collecting these listings is not so effortless. The eight-person, metro points-of-interest team inputs information on categories that include gas stations, cash machines, hotels, tourist attractions – the list is enormous. And while the team will probably be overwhelmed in the future with lists of store locations sent by the businesses NavTech includes, for now it has only one source – the phone book. The team’s typical modus operand!? Wham! Flip to the right section and get typing.

As a section of the database nears completion, when it is as accurate as the sources, digital coding process, and computers can make it, it still may not be accurate enough. There’s only one way to be sure the database is going to work: the win one for the Gipper way – get out there on the double yellow lines and drive it.

NavTech has sent out 12 teams this year to verify and update sections of the database. Picture an army of ants driving rented cars, fanning out across the country to pick through the maze of alleyways and offramps looking for that one small bit, that crumb, of information they missed.

The company has dispatched crews to check the metro databases of Phoenix, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, New Orleans, San Antonio, Austin, and Albuquerque. Meanwhile, the separate highway group maintains an ongoing review process. When NavTech set out to check the Southeast, the company sent 30 people to ride the roads of Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, and the highways in between. It took three weeks to complete.

Out on the road, checking the database is a slow, plodding process. In large metropolitan areas, it isn’t possible to drive every link in the database, so the metro teams focus on proper addressing, one-way streets, and turn-restriction information. “They’re after more of the nitty-gritty stuff,” says Greg Beaulieu, a geographer in the highways group.

Beaulieu has recently returned from Texas, where he and a co-worker drove 4,000 miles of highway for 11 days straight, 12 hours a day. Armed with printouts of the database and a digital copy on a laptop, the two wandered along the road, stopping periodically to shoot every sign they saw – using 67 rolls of film – and gathering information that will be included in the database.

“We went out there and drove it kind of prematurely,” Beaulieu says. “We just had raw, naked geometry to go on, and 1 in 20 times we were just looking for recognizable shapes.” Roamin’ in the gloamin’ under a deep Texas sky may sound inviting, but the process is disturbingly anal. “We’ve got a binder full of screen copy in the order that we’re going to drive it,” explains Beaulieu. “’Coming up we should have Jones Road.’ Sure enough, there it is. We get off, take a photo of the Jones Road offramp, and on the offramp we take photos of all the signs that tell you where you can branch from that offramp. Then we approach it from all possible angles: from the north, hit the cross streets, and then the south. We’ve got every possible sign for any given interchange off any freeway in the whole country.”

Navigation Technologies guarantees its database to be 97 percent accurate; in practice the company believes the figure to be closer to 98 percent. But it all hinges on data freshness. And that’s a problem NavTech is not sure how to surmount. The electronics and auto industries sell durable goods: what you bought two years ago works as well today as when it was new. Their production and distribution systems are tuned for this business. A database, however, is a completely different animal, or, rather, vegetable.

Information is perishable. A two-year-old database will not function as well as it did when you bought it. You expect this from an old map, and you work around its errors. But allow a navigation system with an aging database this luxury and it won’t get you there. NavTech operates on the assumption that information in the road networks – such as addresses and street names – changes 10 percent in a year. After two years, you’ve got only an 80 percent chance of reaching your destination -20 percent of the information is wrong. So how do you get the database to the consumer more quickly?

It’s a question the electronics and auto industries have not been able to answer. In most cases, it takes about three to six months for a component to move from the factory to store shelves. Throughout that process the database becomes older, and you risk selling a product that is already out of date. Even more difficult, Shields explains, “is that the database is not something you sell as a national product – it’s too large. It won’t fit on a CD or any other media. And it’s regional. Handling the distribution of what are different, regional products is something these industries haven’t been able to handle.”

Once you’ve bought a navigation system, the problem becomes more complex, giving NavTech an opportunity to develop a lucrative repeat business. Database updates have to be administered to customers in the field. Perhaps you’ll be able to pull up at your local service station and get oil, lube, and download for $39.95. But for now, NavTech, along with almost everyone else, is waiting things out, watching for the arrival of the next stage in the communications revolution. The company expects that, in the future, customers will be able to hook the database’s hard drive to their PCs and download updates from the Internet. But the great connectivity hasn’t come yet.

Meanwhile, NavTech should have plenty of time to surmount the larger hurdles that stand in the way of mass-market navigation systems. Shields figures that even 5 percent penetration is a ways off. “I’d love to see it,” Shields says, “but you’ve got around 200 million vehicles on the road in the US and Canada, and an equal number in Europe. Five percent of that is 10 million cars. Even matching the cellular model, that’s a growth rate you won’t hit until around 2004.” So Navigation Technologies has strapped itself in for the long haul, riding out this uncertain stretch as industry and consumers adapt to and adopt the new digital “everywhere.”

Although the map database’s knowledge extends to every street and address over a large area, each destination a driver chooses, each computed route, generates a new map reduced to solipsistic specificity. Point A to point B and there the map ends. That’s all you need to know.

It’s pointcasting, if you need a media analog. Old maps, the paper ones, were broadcast, revealing a general subset of the data contained in an area, say, road networks. In the new pointcast media, all destinations exist within the database, but in choosing one, you pull only the information you need. Suddenly you are equally able to get anywhere. The only difference between destinations is time.

Who knows what effects this ability will have on our collective sense of community? Navigation systems are far from ubiquitous. But the implications seem clear. You are now the center of your own mobile universe: you choose your reality through the places you go. The places you avoid effectively cease to exist.

Location is dead.

Rolling along in the Olds Eighty Eight, I can sense it. I’ve been taking directions from a computer for only an hour and my apprehension has subsided. I have no idea where I am at any instant, and I don’t really care. Everything I pass becomes backdrop. In an odd sense, it’s filler – the meaningless time, the meaningless space I pass between the coffee shop and the deli, the museum and the mall.

When I asked NavTech staff about charging businesses for inclusion in the points-of-interest layer of the database, they cited a survey done in April by the Electronics Industry Association that ranked Yellow Pages-style information last in features consumers wanted in a navigation system. Nonetheless, you begin to project: once we’re all navigating our way around by plugging our destinations into a computer, will businesses be able to survive if they’re not in the database? A consumer looking for a grocery store is making a decision – and very possibly a purchase – from the driver’s seat of his or her car. If your business is not in that database, you’re nowhere.

It’s hard to believe that NavTech hasn’t expended much thought on exploiting this. But maybe its present indifference is warranted. The company, along with the entire intelligent-transportation systems industry, must deal with finding its consumers first. So far, only the rental-car market and its hapless travelers have embraced navigation systems. But beginning next year, thanks to Oldsmobile, the systems will begin filtering into the general populace. And they will sell: to gadget freaks, backwoods ramblers, the safety conscious, and then the rest of us. “Do we need navigation systems?” somebody asked me. “What’s the appeal?” Well, we’ve all got microwaves, now don’t we?

Someday soon, it’s very likely that your local auto dealership will ply you with pamphlets advertising wireless emergency-alert systems, paging and e-mail messaging services, electronic travel guides, and a host of other applications still in development today. To one degree or another, these apps all hinge on the installation of the hardware required for the navigation system – display, hard drive, CPU. And if navigation systems prove to be a sustainable killer app, well, damn the torpedoes.

But for now, all this is just one more line crossed, one more shift of the scales toward reliance on the information system, the virtual reality. This time, the icon dissected and digitized is the once great American Road.

Navigation Technologies’ goal is ground truth, and once the geometry is coded into the database, it’s a simple exercise in sampling GPS data and shifting data points a little to the left, or maybe right, to lock in this accuracy. As we struggle to understand the changes technology is wreaking on our lives, perhaps there’s some comfort in knowing that, at least in our cars, we’re entrusting our well-being to a computer fueled with the truth.