During our summer vacation, we drove around rural Missouri guided by an in-car GPS navigation system. As I listened to the directions from the nav system, I found myself wondering if GPS will obsolete most freeway road signs. Signs indicating the name of an exit or freeway will still be useful, but will we still need navigational signs that indicate how to get a specific town, park, or point of interest? My nav system tells me my exit is 15 miles ahead, so why do I care how many miles it is to Rolla? My nav system tells me where the nearest state park is and which exits have gas or fast food, so why should the highway department put up and maintain signs with that same info? (Obviously, businesses would still want to put up billboards, but that’s different — I’m talking about the official highway signs.)

You may be saying, “but not everyone has a GPS nav system”. That’s true, today.  Ten years ago most cars didn’t have CD players or air bags either; today most have them standard. In ten years will in-car nav systems be near-ubiquitous? Today excellent handheld GPS systems start around $150, and the price will almost certainly drop as they get more common.

A good historical reference may be the payphone. 15 years ago it would have been inconcievable to suggest that payphones would be killed by cellphones. Anyone raising the idea would be ridiculed: “What about people who don’t have cellphones?” “What if you need to make a call when your cellphone isn’t working?” “Payphones will always be cheaper than cellphones!” etc. Now, most people have cellphones, and payphones have died. Not everyone has a cellphone, and cellphones have a number of shortcomings, but in the end they took away enough business from payphones that it wasn’t worth maintaining them.

Likewise, in ten years will enough people be using navigation systems that the money currently used to put up and maintain signs be better spent elsewhere?