FWIW 10-20 years earlier [...] You would have simply had no way to find your way to Philadelphia, and would have either waited or turned around and gone home.
What about paper maps? Asking someone for directions?
True, good point. But if I try to imagine the OP taking that route, as a young new driver unfamiliar with the route, in the Philly metro area, I find it hard to imagine that going well? And I would expect them to anticipate the not-going-well and thereby avoid getting into that situation?
The entire region is extremely frustrating for outsiders to navigate even with GPS, and in my experience maps and asking for directions don’t help much. My dad used to be a wholesaler on Long Island, he dispatched trucks to Philly all the time and knew the whole region’s highway system very well, but pre-GPS whenever I asked for directions they ended up being unusably inadequate for one reason or another if I lacked sufficient local knowledge. Otherwise an exit closure or wrong turn became almost unrecoverable. Granted, I have an unusually terrible direction sense.
What about paper maps? Asking someone for directions?
True, good point. But if I try to imagine the OP taking that route, as a young new driver unfamiliar with the route, in the Philly metro area, I find it hard to imagine that going well? And I would expect them to anticipate the not-going-well and thereby avoid getting into that situation?
The entire region is extremely frustrating for outsiders to navigate even with GPS, and in my experience maps and asking for directions don’t help much. My dad used to be a wholesaler on Long Island, he dispatched trucks to Philly all the time and knew the whole region’s highway system very well, but pre-GPS whenever I asked for directions they ended up being unusably inadequate for one reason or another if I lacked sufficient local knowledge. Otherwise an exit closure or wrong turn became almost unrecoverable. Granted, I have an unusually terrible direction sense.