Having just moved to this new city, I challenge myself to drive around it without the aid of GPS. For the first few forays I carefully studied Google Maps before leaving the house, so I could execute the route by memory.

Cities with sane, engineered layouts take very little time to learn. Some also have tricks to make memorization easier: grids, numbered street names, and conventions for North-South versus East-West suffixes. Those cities are trying to make navigation easier both for tourists and natives, and largely succeeding.

The message conveyed by St. John's is to abandon all hope. Few streets join at a ninety degree angle. There's no real grid shape as the city curls around a bay. Street names change every few lights due to ridiculous by-laws. Intersections aren't limited to four intersecting rights-of-way; sometimes there are five or six entryways making a star shape. This results in all sorts of hilarity as "turning right" might mean "this right" or "that right" depending on which option you pick. But the cars have no indicator for "second right", so you have to wing it.

Indicators! As though St. John's drivers would stoop to use indicators. Since most lanes at intersections end up becoming mandatory left or right (or mandatory straight), indicators are irrelevant to the veteran driver. They know that if you're in a certain lane, you have little choice of where to go, so why indicate? But for newcomers it's like a Plinko game from The Price Is Right, where you're supposed to guess a block in advance which lane will lead to your goal, and which empties off into some irrelevant side street.

Dragon's Lair

The driving experience reminds me of that horrible 80's arcade game, Dragon's Lair. It's the laser-disc game that pitched a hero encountering a new threat every 5 seconds, requiring the player to literally guess which action would save him: pushing the joystick one of four directions, or hitting the sword button. There was no opportunity to figure it out: every 5 seconds you had to guess which of the 5 moves was the correct one, and ignore the other 4.

So people eventually won the game simple by trial-and-error; running through each encounter and failing until they found the magical move that would get them through alive. Then they'd memorize the moves and replay them back.

That's what driving across town feels like. You have to know it's the left lane until a certain street, then the middle lane for a couple more sets of lights, then to take the left "Y" at a fork, then the "right right" at a 5-way crossing. And you learn this by getting caught in the wrong lane at each intersection, spirited away to some part of town you don't want to be in.

So I'm learning to drive here the same way I learned Dragon's Lair in the 80's: I'm just memorizing every lane change on every road I'm likely to take, since there's no rhyme or reason or pattern to follow.

Trade-offs

This is a great real world analogue to the trade-offs for new users versus power users of software. If someone's a power user, you can make them jump through all sorts of complex hoops with little information and context simply because they will memorize any amount of weirdness given enough time. But for new users, the spartan visual cues and lack of consistency will be maddening.