I can, but I can easily understand why people don’t. Not really a useful skill if you aren’t into outdoor pursuits is it? And you know, not everyone is – shocking, I know.
By itself no but being able to take a bearing is just part of map reading.
Somewhat independently its also useful to set up an arial or satellite dish
Combined with map-reading having a sense of the direction you are travelling helps know if you are turning left or right… etc.
Not long ago I had to go to a visa place in London with my boss to get some business visa’s. I looked at the route on my phone, memorised it and set off… it was bloody cold and he kept stopping to take his gloves off and look at the phone.He kept following me then stopping to check … and we had an appointment time… so I convinced him to just trust me to get us there without GPS…. we had a single corner and 2 street to go before he doubted me… so I told him.. we go to the next corner, cross the first street and its before the second on the right…
We got there and he thought this was a god like gift…. I think he thought I’d wrestle polar bears in St Petersburg if we met any…
When we got to St Petersburg we had a late flight back on Saturday so we wandered round a few sights. Again I just looked at a map and have a little compass on my rucksack .company phone has no data…so GPS isn’t an option. Its pretty much navigate between dome, palace, bridge… and again he ascribed god like powers to this basic map reading… (My memory is very good for maps and I had an advantage being able to read the signs he couldn’t but still it was just basicmap reading and GPSless navigation)