City centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe

Imagine, by way of contrast, an Italian transport minister suggesting that the historic centres of Italy’s towns and cities be pulled down in order to make space for the growing number of Cinquecentos. They would be ridiculed and laughed out of office, and yet city centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe (which had, in places such as Coventry, started the process) had ever achieved.

C. Wolmar, Are trams socialist? (2016), Kindle loc 382

It seemed to me that satnav had switched off the way that drivers inhabited a city.

It seemed to me that satnav had switched off the way that drivers inhabited a city. It made them rootless, ahistorical, unable to trust their memory or senses, to measure the distance between one place and another. The river Thames, referred to by Londoners as the river, was of no geographical significance to the driver. .... There were no landmarks. The driver did not look at the Albert Halll when we passed on the northern edge of South Kensington, he was absent to its physical presence, and instead was existentially alone but together with his satnav.

D. Levy, The cost of living (2018), 138-9