Certainly you're right though now that I'm thinking about it, one thing that rather worries me is the following - getting around Boston and immediate environs (without getting lost) has, for a very long time, taken considerable local knowledge. This is an important factor in the speed of emergency response and I think that in the past (and still to a considerable extent) firefighters, police officers, ambulance drivers etc and their dispatchers relied heavily on good personal local knowledge - I'm sure they have all had ready access to (paper) maps for a long time but probably in general they seldom had to use them. I can't help but wonder whether today increasing reliance on tools like google maps (emergency responders perhaps don't use it but they probably have similar tools that are customized for their industry) is replacing this local knowledge and whether in confusing-to-navigate places like Boston this may actually make emergency response worse rather than better.
I know that as enhanced 911 (a feature that automatically gives the 911 dispatcher the street address of the calling phone - which of course gets all kinds of messed with by the fact that increasingly people don't have landlines and address-locating mobile phones is somewhat iffy business even when the phone contains a GPS receiver... but I digress) was being implemented in the 1990s, states and municipalities were strongly encouraged to do the following two things: - Develop electronic databases that accurately reflect the physical location of every address on every street - Change street names as necessary so there would be no duplicate street names in the same municipality
Boston has probably done the former quite well by now but the latter seems like an "ain't never gonna happen."
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Date: 2011-04-09 04:11 pm (UTC)I know that as enhanced 911 (a feature that automatically gives the 911 dispatcher the street address of the calling phone - which of course gets all kinds of messed with by the fact that increasingly people don't have landlines and address-locating mobile phones is somewhat iffy business even when the phone contains a GPS receiver... but I digress) was being implemented in the 1990s, states and municipalities were strongly encouraged to do the following two things:
- Develop electronic databases that accurately reflect the physical location of every address on every street
- Change street names as necessary so there would be no duplicate street names in the same municipality
Boston has probably done the former quite well by now but the latter seems like an "ain't never gonna happen."