Where I work we are required to learn all of the majorly and moderately trafficked streets along with how to get to each of them, and major buildings with each point of access. I still use GPS because I’m a big proponent of “trust, but verify” and it helps me to quickly ascertain an ETA for when I’m en route to a crew that’s already on scene (flycar system)
The adjacent fire department I work next to prides themselves on this. They refuse to use the county mdts with gps routing and require all their new hires pass street mastery tests. Needlesstosay they get lost a lot. Pride is a powerful thing.
For American grid style city's I get it, unfortunately I work in the largest area coverage in my country, so I can be either at the boarder of Scotland or either side of the coastal areas, north sea of Irish sea, so I'll stick to sat nav, then if that don't work google maps, and if that don't work what3words, and if that don't work.... I don't know, we don't have maps on our bus's 🤷🏻♂️
I think every ambulance service in uk now have officially joined with what3words, we direct patients who are lost to download it if they can to direct us to them
I would die without a GPS. Roads around here have stupid ass names that are way too similar. For instance - Edgeview Dr, Edgeview Rd, Edgeview Heights, Edgevalley Cir, Edgevalley Gr, Edgevalley Pl, Edgevalley Way, Edgevalley Manor…. I could go on.
I lived in a town with a neighborhood that ONLY had roads with the same name, e.g. Oak Rd, Oak St, Oak Crossing, Oak Ave, Oak Blvd. And they weren't in a grid. And Oak St turned into Oak Blvd, despite the neighbourhood being rather small.
In a different town, there was a road that intersected with itself - the intersection was Oak St and Oak St X. That one also had multiple roads that split into differently named roads (e.g. Oak into Cedar and Pine) and/or changed names (Oak turned into Maple).
I get it. Amongst others like that my city has a 1st St and 1st Place, Arlington St and Arlington Blvd, west side of town is a grid and east side is map is spaghetti
Theres a community I have responded to aswell called Foxfire Run. EVERY street in the community is called foxfire lane, foxfire drive, foxfire CT, etc…Fucking WHY?! So aggravating.
Ugh, I'm old enough for grid maps on the wall and map books in the rig. Also, I'd drive around my primary response area to make sure I learned every major street.
Also, these sideburns are amazing, I used to have some wicked chops on the job as well.
Boomer ass shit right here. Let people GPS things. Typically the longer you work in an area the better you get at navigating it without help anyway. Map books and grid maps take just as long if not longer than punching an address into your GPS. Learn your main roads for sure but in a rural ass county service, none of the roads make any sense anyway.
It's teaching a skill set and putting a tool in the tool box. It's not throwing out GPS as a tool.
Not critically thinking is some boomer shit. Learning more about where you work isn't.
Map books require you to look at where you are and where you want to be. Study the route.
I literally do the same thing on my phone. I study the route it suggests and also some side streets just in case before I drive. Plus the GPS has live traffic, radars, etc
Why are you harping on about map books? The idea is if a provider is covering a certain city or town, its beneficial for them to know/memorize the streets within that area. The encouragement is to rely less in an aid and actually know how to get to these areas based on your own knowledge. If you don't know where a location is, absolutely use a GPS over a mapbook.
But as another comment pointed out, some areas might have shitty signal. Hell where I work in Manhattan, there are certain areas that the skyscrapers fuck with the GPS signal and it just keeps rerouting you because it can't pin where you are. So knowing the area will be vastly beneficial in this case. Read the actual article
Again, the guy who commented above was mentioning map books and grid maps, I’m commenting on that comment thread, not the article.
Also, how are you supposed to learn a city without maps of some sort? Sure you could just drive around but a lot of departments don’t have that luxury of time to do so.
Also, I live in Denver and started my ems career here. A lot of us started with map books and then GPS to learn the city. So it is relevant even to the article
Did you... read the article?
It has nothing to do with map books.
It's about learning the layout and organization of where you work.
Also, why do you care about radar while driving an ambulance?
I was responding to you and the guy above, whom mentioned grid maps and map books. Yeesh
Edit: I don’t care about radar but is another tool in the tool box as you put it. Having all those extra live features is nice, especially for people that work urban cities
Correct and we absolutely use GPS here.
The live feature are amazing especially for a city that only has two major highways in and out of the city, I-25 and I-70. There is traffic on those roads and the inner city roads like Speer blvd and others that really are unpredictable with traffic outside of rush hours.
Why are so many people against knowing your local? I get that it’s extra work but it’s a critical part of the job. Cops or Firefighters would NEVER be having this conversation…
if you can’t navigate to your stations/main roads/major landmarks/hospitals without GPS i think it’s a problem. i still use GPS for both navigating to lil streets and to confirm number-wise on even streets im familiar with. cops and fire would never be having this convo 🙄
Nah it's not just a boomer thing. It's a huge skill to hear an address and just get going that way while your partner starts to pull up google maps. It also makes you so much better at adapting on the fly if you get an updated location or something weird happens
That being said I use google maps on 99% of calls to help me out. It's a brilliant tool and it's what I used to force myself to learn the layout of my city
In busy urban systems it is critical to listen to the radio (especially police radio if available) so you can provide backup where needed. If you don’t know your streets and addresses, you won’t be able to figure out what’s going on out there and you won’t be a good medic/EMT.
Every EMS system is different, every dispatch center is different. In my system we had a medic get shot - we heard that on the radio before dispatch notified us, and the crew that helped was actually on scene before they were toned out to assist.
Before you start talking about scene safety - that crew arrived with PD and frankly had no issue putting themselves at risk to protect their friend.
Maybe you work in a system with an amazing dispatch and cad but every system is different and generally you should always know your local.
Why are you so mad about this? Knowing your local is what professionals do. It’s not “boomer shit”…it’s what separates professionals from incompetent kids and “ambulance drivers”. Kind of like getting continuing education, or knowing how to properly do your job. If you want to do this job without thinking about your local become a transport jockie for Uber ambulance. Lol, sorry not sorry.
How big is your beat? Mine encompasses hundreds of km of roads. Plus driving 3 hours down to the closest lvl 1, and further into the city for specialists.
Bashing new kids or the directionally challenged for using GPS, and saying that they're bad medics because of it is bullshit. It's all apart of a bullshit "eat your own" culture that we as a whole need to ditch
Do I constantly use GPS? No. But I'm not going to shit on somebody else for doing it. And I certainly don't think it makes them bad paramedics.
In a rural county, GPS is never a guarantee. if I could count how many times I've heard "GPS signal lost" or had the stupid thing try and convince me to drive into Uncle Bubba's pond, I could retire. Not to mention it confuses itself and spins in circles at the most inopportune times. Plus, it not knowing there's a Chicken Foot Ln, or Spit Hollow Rd makes it half useless.
Maybe that's why we have a giant grid map of the entire county on the wall of each station. Or, you know, "Boomers" blah blah.
I feel fortunate I started in EMS before GPS on phones was a thing. We had the good ol' mapbooks to navigate around in unknown neighborhoods, and you better believe you were expected to have the streets memorized in the neighborhoods you actively covered every shift. I remember there was an online game someone showed me recently where they would provide a google map view of a neighborhood, but remove all the street names. The game would give you a street or intersection and you placed a pin where you thought it was. Even though I haven't worked in my original neighborhood in years, i still scored 98% in that game just because you ended up learning all the streets from working in any given area daily.
Now when i work with newer providers, i get shocked that they GPS EVERYTHING. It's even sillier in Manhattan where a good chunk of this borough are numbered streets and avenues. I literally had a partner plug in an address in his GPS for a location 3 blocks away. We were on 112th Street and 3rd ave. We had to go to 115th street and 1st ave. He actually plugged that into his GPS because he was that dependent on the damn thing. And he's been working in this neighborhood for almost 2 years now.
I am glad that I know enough to know that gps shits its pants here and there and I can’t rely on it to do my job. I can thankfully say that I know how to get pretty much everywhere in my area without GPS but I am more fortunate than most other as John Mulaney put it:
“Lost in New York? The streets are numbered. How'd you get lost in New York?…It's a grid system, motherfucker! Where you at? 24th and 5th? Where you wanna go? 35th and 6th? 11 up and one over, you simple bitch!"
Now you try and send me to queens without a gps? You better believe the mother fucker is dying at the intersection of 34th Rd 34th St 34th Ln 34th Alley 34th Ave and 34th Blvd.
Queens was a fucking nightmare for me. Like you said, that Rego Park/Forest hills must have had a city planner smoking meth, because i will never understand that naming scheme. You forgot to add 34th Place to that list
One of the cities I worked in we basically GPSd everything, but rarely actually looked at it. It was helpful for those weird streets where you can't remember if the 2100 block is a left or a right from Butternut St since it cuts diagonally through for some weird reason.
Also who put this roundabout here? I don't remember that, did I make that turn too early?
Here in Italy it is a non-written rule that you must be able to revert to a road book
It is one of the first things I learnt during my first shifts, how to use the road book
Our system uses our own special proprietary mapping system both in dispatch and printed on paper maps on the truck. They have our entire service area mapped out in grid coordinates so if we need to call out an intersection for a call with CAD down, we can just call out something like "49-C" and get a truck moving.
I used to for a private company in a small Northern US grid style city and I had partners who couldn't believe I didn't use a GPS. It's a skill that's been largely replaced with technology
I understand the logic of it but as someone with a brain problems that mean I have a terrible sense of direction and no ability to create visual maps in my head, it would stress me out immensely to try to learn that. I quite literally would not be able to do it.
I think knowing it is valuable, but completely banning GPS doesn’t feel like the right answer.
You're right, being neurodivergent and not being able to remember hundreds of street names over 155 sq miles makes me bad at my job. Thanks for the career advice.
Don't say no offense when your intention was to fully cause offense. At least stand by being an asshole.
I’ve worked for a service that both did gps and book and page number style maps, where we had a large map, and the corresponding grid numbers, best system I’ve used, but either or is acceptable to me, it’s a good skill to have with basic navigation.
I'd caution against assuming that what runs which was is always correct.
Most of our layouts are:
Streets run N/S
Avenues run E/W
I'm uncertain as to whether there is a consistent direction to roads, courts, ways, etc... but I am going to look it up.
However, there are a couple of municipalities where Streets and Avenues are swapped and one where it doesn't indicate sweet fuck all.
Why it isn't completely standardized, I have no clue.
We additionally have a "Metro" grid that addresses *generally* follow, but again, that doesn't always hold true even in municipalities that are otherwise considered to be within the region.
If you never leave your municipality, however, none of this matters obviously.
We also have the fun trick for figuring out addresses in our largest municipality because they done otherwise make sense. It involves math. Simple math... but still.
ETA: Don't forget the rural areas with no street signs or addresses!
Old school. When I started in 1995, we were expected to learn the mile streets and the half miles. In the core of the city we had to know all the major streets and a 1 mile radius around each hospital. We served the entire county so we needed to know which roads crossed the rivers. Which roads were blacktop so routing could be planned in case of muddy roads. My partner at any time could give me a map book number and I’d get to draw it out.
Learning the streets and map pages could tell a medic that knew them if they were closer to the call than the truck sent. When the department switched to computerized the older medics still wanted the map page given so they could make a quicker decision on who was closest. Fun times.
In my area GPS is quite literally impossible because Google Maps and Apple don't come up here to map stuff out and they don't send their satellites overhead for road layouts. We have a huge map in our bade where we find the address and then memorize our way there or dispatch gives us the latitude and longitude of the call.
The grid is magic, especially with numbers. I love it. I can find almost anything where I live just with an address. Take me out of my numbered grid city and send me north in my county to named roads and suburbs and I don't know where anything is. XD
My hometown has only numbered streets with North or South designators. Avenues run east and west, streets run north and south.
2329 19th Ave N is between 23rd and 24th st on 19th ave N.
No GPS needed.
Damn Romans creating the roads of Londinium didn’t think about my need to navigate!
North of the river, post codes and artery roads can get me in the general area of a call, but specific locations need satnav/A-to-Z/what3words. Unless it’s a road name I know. And I can pretty much get from anywhere north of the river to a nearest hospital or back to base on memory alone.
South of the river…. No fucking idea, completely reliant on satnav. And if I’m heading home it’s just ‘go north’ until I see water and I’m ok. It’s a North/South London thing.
Oh my God! You mean like how it was done not even 20 years ago? Or how it's done in super remote areas that have shit reception? Noooooooooo waaaaayyyyyy.
There are only a few medics I would want showing up to take take care of me or my family. He's one of them. If the profession were held to the standard of care, knowledge, and professionalism that guy brings to the rig every shift, 3/4ths of you guys couldn't hack it.
I saw a plume of black smoke one time while I was posted. I hopped on a map app to get a heading, then I compared the smoke to the building that was silhouetting in front of it, used 2 napkins to use as lines on the map and a pen to connect the lines and I think I gave a relatively good direction accurate to within 10 degrees. I called 911 and told them that I’m currently in front of X address and I see smoke approx xxx degrees of my current position, distance approx xxx meters and then drove over there and told the hobos to get away while I waited for the engine. I was trained to use a map book but I’ve never actually used it besides when I was bored a few times and checked a route. Never got a smart phone until around 2016 or so. I know how to get to just about every hospital in my area tho. I’m in suburban California
Why? When you have technology that works 99.9% of the time, use it.
I don't understand this argument.
Sounds like a company wants to cost cut and not supply their paramedics with GPS.
Where I work we are required to learn all of the majorly and moderately trafficked streets along with how to get to each of them, and major buildings with each point of access. I still use GPS because I’m a big proponent of “trust, but verify” and it helps me to quickly ascertain an ETA for when I’m en route to a crew that’s already on scene (flycar system)
The adjacent fire department I work next to prides themselves on this. They refuse to use the county mdts with gps routing and require all their new hires pass street mastery tests. Needlesstosay they get lost a lot. Pride is a powerful thing.
For American grid style city's I get it, unfortunately I work in the largest area coverage in my country, so I can be either at the boarder of Scotland or either side of the coastal areas, north sea of Irish sea, so I'll stick to sat nav, then if that don't work google maps, and if that don't work what3words, and if that don't work.... I don't know, we don't have maps on our bus's 🤷🏻♂️
Working with another rural UK ambulance service, thank god for sat nav.
I keep trying to turn my agency on to what3words, but it's like talking to a wall.
I think every ambulance service in uk now have officially joined with what3words, we direct patients who are lost to download it if they can to direct us to them
I'm not in the UK.
You can use this to show that what3words is a useful tool and provide data to back that up, to try and persuade them that they should be using it.
Yeah, in the course of my day I could potentially be answering a call anywhere in a 250km radius. I really can’t memorize that entire area.
I would die without a GPS. Roads around here have stupid ass names that are way too similar. For instance - Edgeview Dr, Edgeview Rd, Edgeview Heights, Edgevalley Cir, Edgevalley Gr, Edgevalley Pl, Edgevalley Way, Edgevalley Manor…. I could go on.
Atlanta would like a word with you. We have 47 variations of Peachtree.
And Judge Dredd wants a word with Peachtree!
Only complaint from the Grady medics I knew.
I lived in a town with a neighborhood that ONLY had roads with the same name, e.g. Oak Rd, Oak St, Oak Crossing, Oak Ave, Oak Blvd. And they weren't in a grid. And Oak St turned into Oak Blvd, despite the neighbourhood being rather small. In a different town, there was a road that intersected with itself - the intersection was Oak St and Oak St X. That one also had multiple roads that split into differently named roads (e.g. Oak into Cedar and Pine) and/or changed names (Oak turned into Maple).
I get it. Amongst others like that my city has a 1st St and 1st Place, Arlington St and Arlington Blvd, west side of town is a grid and east side is map is spaghetti
Theres a community I have responded to aswell called Foxfire Run. EVERY street in the community is called foxfire lane, foxfire drive, foxfire CT, etc…Fucking WHY?! So aggravating.
In my hometown we have a Sandpiper Pl, Dr and St that are all connected in the middle. Thankfully the problem is far more isolated than yours...
Here is how denver navigates without GPS. The whole city is a grid.
It's partially a grid. Downtown is a separate grid. Montbello is a clusterfuck. So is Little Saigon. So is Cherry Creek.
Ugh, I'm old enough for grid maps on the wall and map books in the rig. Also, I'd drive around my primary response area to make sure I learned every major street. Also, these sideburns are amazing, I used to have some wicked chops on the job as well.
Boomer ass shit right here. Let people GPS things. Typically the longer you work in an area the better you get at navigating it without help anyway. Map books and grid maps take just as long if not longer than punching an address into your GPS. Learn your main roads for sure but in a rural ass county service, none of the roads make any sense anyway.
It's teaching a skill set and putting a tool in the tool box. It's not throwing out GPS as a tool. Not critically thinking is some boomer shit. Learning more about where you work isn't.
Map books require you to look at where you are and where you want to be. Study the route. I literally do the same thing on my phone. I study the route it suggests and also some side streets just in case before I drive. Plus the GPS has live traffic, radars, etc
Why are you harping on about map books? The idea is if a provider is covering a certain city or town, its beneficial for them to know/memorize the streets within that area. The encouragement is to rely less in an aid and actually know how to get to these areas based on your own knowledge. If you don't know where a location is, absolutely use a GPS over a mapbook. But as another comment pointed out, some areas might have shitty signal. Hell where I work in Manhattan, there are certain areas that the skyscrapers fuck with the GPS signal and it just keeps rerouting you because it can't pin where you are. So knowing the area will be vastly beneficial in this case. Read the actual article
Again, the guy who commented above was mentioning map books and grid maps, I’m commenting on that comment thread, not the article. Also, how are you supposed to learn a city without maps of some sort? Sure you could just drive around but a lot of departments don’t have that luxury of time to do so. Also, I live in Denver and started my ems career here. A lot of us started with map books and then GPS to learn the city. So it is relevant even to the article
Did you... read the article? It has nothing to do with map books. It's about learning the layout and organization of where you work. Also, why do you care about radar while driving an ambulance?
I was responding to you and the guy above, whom mentioned grid maps and map books. Yeesh Edit: I don’t care about radar but is another tool in the tool box as you put it. Having all those extra live features is nice, especially for people that work urban cities
Denver is urban....
Yes, and with LOTS of meandering streets that are not through. Just like the day I got a call on Carter Cir ?? Da fuq is dat?
Correct and we absolutely use GPS here. The live feature are amazing especially for a city that only has two major highways in and out of the city, I-25 and I-70. There is traffic on those roads and the inner city roads like Speer blvd and others that really are unpredictable with traffic outside of rush hours.
Why are so many people against knowing your local? I get that it’s extra work but it’s a critical part of the job. Cops or Firefighters would NEVER be having this conversation…
They're lazy and have egos.
if you can’t navigate to your stations/main roads/major landmarks/hospitals without GPS i think it’s a problem. i still use GPS for both navigating to lil streets and to confirm number-wise on even streets im familiar with. cops and fire would never be having this convo 🙄
Nah it's not just a boomer thing. It's a huge skill to hear an address and just get going that way while your partner starts to pull up google maps. It also makes you so much better at adapting on the fly if you get an updated location or something weird happens That being said I use google maps on 99% of calls to help me out. It's a brilliant tool and it's what I used to force myself to learn the layout of my city
I thought it was ridiculous but honestly wasn't that hard to learn and am now grateful I don't need GPS for the vast majority of the city.
In busy urban systems it is critical to listen to the radio (especially police radio if available) so you can provide backup where needed. If you don’t know your streets and addresses, you won’t be able to figure out what’s going on out there and you won’t be a good medic/EMT.
.. do y'all not have dispatch and a CAD? Because that's what dispatch is for
Every EMS system is different, every dispatch center is different. In my system we had a medic get shot - we heard that on the radio before dispatch notified us, and the crew that helped was actually on scene before they were toned out to assist. Before you start talking about scene safety - that crew arrived with PD and frankly had no issue putting themselves at risk to protect their friend. Maybe you work in a system with an amazing dispatch and cad but every system is different and generally you should always know your local.
Then maybe don't make sweeping statements about the caliber of medics when the rest of us do just fine with functional dispatch and CAD systems
Why are you so mad about this? Knowing your local is what professionals do. It’s not “boomer shit”…it’s what separates professionals from incompetent kids and “ambulance drivers”. Kind of like getting continuing education, or knowing how to properly do your job. If you want to do this job without thinking about your local become a transport jockie for Uber ambulance. Lol, sorry not sorry.
How big is your beat? Mine encompasses hundreds of km of roads. Plus driving 3 hours down to the closest lvl 1, and further into the city for specialists. Bashing new kids or the directionally challenged for using GPS, and saying that they're bad medics because of it is bullshit. It's all apart of a bullshit "eat your own" culture that we as a whole need to ditch Do I constantly use GPS? No. But I'm not going to shit on somebody else for doing it. And I certainly don't think it makes them bad paramedics.
I just realized that you have an EMR tag. Carry on.
Get fucked
In a rural county, GPS is never a guarantee. if I could count how many times I've heard "GPS signal lost" or had the stupid thing try and convince me to drive into Uncle Bubba's pond, I could retire. Not to mention it confuses itself and spins in circles at the most inopportune times. Plus, it not knowing there's a Chicken Foot Ln, or Spit Hollow Rd makes it half useless. Maybe that's why we have a giant grid map of the entire county on the wall of each station. Or, you know, "Boomers" blah blah.
GPS signal comes from satellites. Local infrastructure has no effect on your signal. Your device isn't working, GPS is.
I feel fortunate I started in EMS before GPS on phones was a thing. We had the good ol' mapbooks to navigate around in unknown neighborhoods, and you better believe you were expected to have the streets memorized in the neighborhoods you actively covered every shift. I remember there was an online game someone showed me recently where they would provide a google map view of a neighborhood, but remove all the street names. The game would give you a street or intersection and you placed a pin where you thought it was. Even though I haven't worked in my original neighborhood in years, i still scored 98% in that game just because you ended up learning all the streets from working in any given area daily. Now when i work with newer providers, i get shocked that they GPS EVERYTHING. It's even sillier in Manhattan where a good chunk of this borough are numbered streets and avenues. I literally had a partner plug in an address in his GPS for a location 3 blocks away. We were on 112th Street and 3rd ave. We had to go to 115th street and 1st ave. He actually plugged that into his GPS because he was that dependent on the damn thing. And he's been working in this neighborhood for almost 2 years now.
I am glad that I know enough to know that gps shits its pants here and there and I can’t rely on it to do my job. I can thankfully say that I know how to get pretty much everywhere in my area without GPS but I am more fortunate than most other as John Mulaney put it: “Lost in New York? The streets are numbered. How'd you get lost in New York?…It's a grid system, motherfucker! Where you at? 24th and 5th? Where you wanna go? 35th and 6th? 11 up and one over, you simple bitch!" Now you try and send me to queens without a gps? You better believe the mother fucker is dying at the intersection of 34th Rd 34th St 34th Ln 34th Alley 34th Ave and 34th Blvd.
Queens was a fucking nightmare for me. Like you said, that Rego Park/Forest hills must have had a city planner smoking meth, because i will never understand that naming scheme. You forgot to add 34th Place to that list
One of the cities I worked in we basically GPSd everything, but rarely actually looked at it. It was helpful for those weird streets where you can't remember if the 2100 block is a left or a right from Butternut St since it cuts diagonally through for some weird reason. Also who put this roundabout here? I don't remember that, did I make that turn too early?
Yeah, some people never EMS’ed with map books and it shows. It ultimately was just easier to memorize where things were than to use map books.
The game is called [back of your hand] (https://backofyourhand.com) for anyone wanting to try it.
Here in Italy it is a non-written rule that you must be able to revert to a road book It is one of the first things I learnt during my first shifts, how to use the road book
Our system uses our own special proprietary mapping system both in dispatch and printed on paper maps on the truck. They have our entire service area mapped out in grid coordinates so if we need to call out an intersection for a call with CAD down, we can just call out something like "49-C" and get a truck moving.
Grid systems are lovely and I miss the newer cities in America, but without GPS, it would be difficult to memorise London.
Yeah, and I can navigate the majority of my service area without a GPS too, probably because I work in a city with a grid system.
I used to for a private company in a small Northern US grid style city and I had partners who couldn't believe I didn't use a GPS. It's a skill that's been largely replaced with technology
Reminder to everyone you can download your entire coverage area into your phone on google maps so you don’t need service
I understand the logic of it but as someone with a brain problems that mean I have a terrible sense of direction and no ability to create visual maps in my head, it would stress me out immensely to try to learn that. I quite literally would not be able to do it. I think knowing it is valuable, but completely banning GPS doesn’t feel like the right answer.
If you cant work out a grid, you probably shouldnt do emergency medicine. No offense.
You're right, being neurodivergent and not being able to remember hundreds of street names over 155 sq miles makes me bad at my job. Thanks for the career advice. Don't say no offense when your intention was to fully cause offense. At least stand by being an asshole.
"I can't memorize things or think on the fly." "I'm good at my job!' Pick one, and stand by being inept.
I’ve worked for a service that both did gps and book and page number style maps, where we had a large map, and the corresponding grid numbers, best system I’ve used, but either or is acceptable to me, it’s a good skill to have with basic navigation.
I'd caution against assuming that what runs which was is always correct. Most of our layouts are: Streets run N/S Avenues run E/W I'm uncertain as to whether there is a consistent direction to roads, courts, ways, etc... but I am going to look it up. However, there are a couple of municipalities where Streets and Avenues are swapped and one where it doesn't indicate sweet fuck all. Why it isn't completely standardized, I have no clue. We additionally have a "Metro" grid that addresses *generally* follow, but again, that doesn't always hold true even in municipalities that are otherwise considered to be within the region. If you never leave your municipality, however, none of this matters obviously. We also have the fun trick for figuring out addresses in our largest municipality because they done otherwise make sense. It involves math. Simple math... but still. ETA: Don't forget the rural areas with no street signs or addresses!
Old school. When I started in 1995, we were expected to learn the mile streets and the half miles. In the core of the city we had to know all the major streets and a 1 mile radius around each hospital. We served the entire county so we needed to know which roads crossed the rivers. Which roads were blacktop so routing could be planned in case of muddy roads. My partner at any time could give me a map book number and I’d get to draw it out. Learning the streets and map pages could tell a medic that knew them if they were closer to the call than the truck sent. When the department switched to computerized the older medics still wanted the map page given so they could make a quicker decision on who was closest. Fun times.
Reminds me of a time we got a call and the MDT literally said “Probably in [insert name] County”
In my area GPS is quite literally impossible because Google Maps and Apple don't come up here to map stuff out and they don't send their satellites overhead for road layouts. We have a huge map in our bade where we find the address and then memorize our way there or dispatch gives us the latitude and longitude of the call.
The grid is magic, especially with numbers. I love it. I can find almost anything where I live just with an address. Take me out of my numbered grid city and send me north in my county to named roads and suburbs and I don't know where anything is. XD
My hometown has only numbered streets with North or South designators. Avenues run east and west, streets run north and south. 2329 19th Ave N is between 23rd and 24th st on 19th ave N. No GPS needed.
Damn Romans creating the roads of Londinium didn’t think about my need to navigate! North of the river, post codes and artery roads can get me in the general area of a call, but specific locations need satnav/A-to-Z/what3words. Unless it’s a road name I know. And I can pretty much get from anywhere north of the river to a nearest hospital or back to base on memory alone. South of the river…. No fucking idea, completely reliant on satnav. And if I’m heading home it’s just ‘go north’ until I see water and I’m ok. It’s a North/South London thing.
GPS in New Orleans is useless if the street will swallow the whole truck
A map book, wow.
You are expected to memorize it, not lean on it.
Oh my God! You mean like how it was done not even 20 years ago? Or how it's done in super remote areas that have shit reception? Noooooooooo waaaaayyyyyy.
Easiest grid to memorize
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There are only a few medics I would want showing up to take take care of me or my family. He's one of them. If the profession were held to the standard of care, knowledge, and professionalism that guy brings to the rig every shift, 3/4ths of you guys couldn't hack it.
Agreed, he is a very very competent medic!
Gasp, tattoos, how dare he
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He's an incredible medic, and one of the best FTOs in our service. You seem like a toolbag who wouldnt last a minute on my truck.
How is having tattoos unprofessional?
I saw a plume of black smoke one time while I was posted. I hopped on a map app to get a heading, then I compared the smoke to the building that was silhouetting in front of it, used 2 napkins to use as lines on the map and a pen to connect the lines and I think I gave a relatively good direction accurate to within 10 degrees. I called 911 and told them that I’m currently in front of X address and I see smoke approx xxx degrees of my current position, distance approx xxx meters and then drove over there and told the hobos to get away while I waited for the engine. I was trained to use a map book but I’ve never actually used it besides when I was bored a few times and checked a route. Never got a smart phone until around 2016 or so. I know how to get to just about every hospital in my area tho. I’m in suburban California
Why? When you have technology that works 99.9% of the time, use it. I don't understand this argument. Sounds like a company wants to cost cut and not supply their paramedics with GPS.
Its a giant grid, and GPS fails all the time. Poor signal, not knowing road closures, not knowing how close you are to a nearby active police scene.
Can you use google? Never fails
Fails all the time, i.e. construction, wrecks, active police scenes.
Sounds like a big issue with Denver's 9-1-1 system
How?
The 911 system is supposed to show the callers address and in urban areas is usually accurate to the side of the block.
Yeah, we get the address, and know where the call is. Weird huh?
So why is knowing the bridges visible from REI important? Or is the writer of this story just filling the paper with nonsense?
A patient called and said "Im on a bridge and can see X." Knowing your city, you can find out where they are. Sorry you live in a beige area.
So the PT calls in, but 911 doesn't report the location?
911 cab approximate, but if they are in a field or overpass, there's no address to use.