Once upon a time, taxi drivers had to demonstrate that they could find their way around a city before they were given a license. It may be folklore, but my understanding is that prospective London taxi-drivers had to memorize most of the arcane streets and points of interest within that ancient city. At the very least, taxi drivers were expected to have a detailed (paper) map that would show them how to navigate to someplace they’d never been to. And I’ve been in taxis where the befuddled driver would ask the dispatcher — using the old-fashioned radio communications system — how to get from point A to B.

Even so, I’ve occasionally encountered situations — especially here in New York, where I live — where a taxi driver would respond to my requested destination by saying, “I’m sorry, but this is my first day on the job. Could you tell me how to get there?” Back in the 1970s, I lived in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn — long before it became fashionable and well known — and I could sympathize with a newbie taxi driver who had only memorized the streets of midtown Manhattan. But when I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I still occasionally ran into taxi drivers who didn’t know the difference between East 72nd Street and West 72nd Street. Duh, there’s a park separating the two!

Of course, all of this presumes that you can have an intelligent conversation with the taxi driver; in New York, for example, you would expect that conversation to take place in English. But over the years, wave after wave of immigrants have often chosen taxi-driving as their first job; so I’ve attempted to deal with these “How do I get there?” conversations in Russian, Yiddish, Arabic, Farsi, Vietnamese, and other languages that I couldn’t even identify.

But that was then, and this is now. Technology — especially in the form of a GPS navigation system — has changed the behavior of taxi drivers … though not necessarily for the better. I discovered this when I arrived in Minneapolis the other night; my destination was a downtown hotel I had never heard of (the Graves 601, which turned out to be pretty cool), but which I assumed my taxi driver would know about. Well, not so: my driver, a pleasant young man who spoke unaccented English, said he had never heard of it. Being reasonably well organized on this particular trip, I turned on my Palm Pilot, checked one of the calendar entries where I had stored the hotel’s address, phone number, and even the confirmation number for my reservation.)

“601 First Avenue North,” I told him. Hey, “First Avenue” — sounds like a pretty straightforward address, right?

“Which city?” he countered.

Huh? Oh, yes, Minneapolis has a twin city: St. Paul. And maybe there are suburbs and neighboring towns that are big enough to have a First Avenue, and maybe even a Second and Third. So I assured the driver that the address, and the hotel, were indeed located in downtown Minneapolis.

He shook his head, as if I had asked him to solve a complex math problem with partial differential equations. “I dunno,” said. “I think I’d better use my GPS system.”

Well, okay: so maybe it was his first day on the job. And maybe First Avenue isn’t as obvious as it seems. So why not take advantage of modern technology? And sure enough, the driver had his own portable GPS device, which he retrieved and turned on.

After indicating his desire to find a specific location, the GPS device spoke in a fairly robotic female voice: “City?”

Now, I may not be the world’s greatest expert on user interfaces, but it seems to me that a reasonable system would recognize “Minneapolis” after the first few letters had been pressed — after all, how many cities could possibly begin with the letters “MINNE”? But this one, it seemed, insisted on all 11 letters being typed. And my increasingly frustrated driver had enormous difficulty figuring out how to spell the name of the city in which he was employed, and was equally clumsy with the actual keying of individual letters. It took 12 times — I counted them, and I’m not exaggerating — 12 separate attempts, before the GPS device accepted “Minneapolis” and then asked “Street?”

“What street was it?” the driver asked.

“First Avenue North,” I reminded him.

“How do you spell that?” he asked.

“How do you spell what?” I replied.

“First,” he said.

Well, he tried “First,” “first,” “1st” and probably a few other permutations. Nothing worked.

By now, 10-15 minutes had elapsed, and I was desperately wishing I didn’t have a suitcase in the trunk of his taxi; otherwise, I would have gotten out of his cab, and left him playing with his GPS device for the rest of the night. But I was stuck, and he was determined that he’d figure it all out in one more attempt.

Finally, the driver had the good sense to start all over again, and ask the GPS device to display a list of nearby “popular locations,” which led to a sub-menu of “Hotels,” which then allowed him to select the first letter of my hotel. He scrolled through the list of hotels beginning with “G,” and then said — as if I had speaking to him in ancient Urdu all evening — “Oh, it’s the Graves 601 Hotel.”

“Right!” I said.

Well, it turned out that he had still never heard of it — but at least the GPS device knew where it was … and so, off we went.

At the end of the trip, the driver dropped me off on the wrong side of the street (he thought “600 First Avenue North” was reasonably close to “601 First Avenue North,” apparently unaware that odd-numbered addresses were on one side of the street, and even-numbered addresses were on the other side). And he didn’t have enough small bills to give me correct change for the $20 bill I gave him … but at least I escaped with my life.

But the experience did leave me wondering whether we might not be better off with old-fashioned low-tech approaches, like maps and memorizing of major streets in a city …