Yeah–my mom and stepdad live in a rural area near three towns, and when I’m going somewhere in any of those towns, they want to give me all kinds of shortcuts. I’ve learned that nothing works except nodding and smiling and thanking them for their extensive directions, then going out to the car and pulling up Google Maps.
They fundamentally think about directions differently from how I do.
Ha! Yes, I do exactly the same thing. No, I’m not going to memorize your twenty step list of instructions in order to get to the store, I’m just gonna punch it into my GPS. But telling you that will lead to a five minute discussion at the end of which you’ll insist on repeating your instructions anyways (and this time you’ll be watching to make sure I pay attention). Better to smile, nod, and disregard.
Go that way out of the house, make the first left, take that to the end and make another left, then bear right at the fork, then go to the fifth? light and make a right, go through another 3 lights then make a left.
You can’t miss it.
<20 minutes later>Hi! I’m back. I think I might have missed a turn and I’ve ended up back here.
You know, sometimes the locals do know better. But hey, just follow your GPS into a reservoir or off a bridge that’s out. Works for me.
Could someone explain how in the US a road open to the public, with an official name and with house numbers, serving properties of different owners, can be the duty of a private entity to maintain as opposed to the municipiality?
Can’t answer for the US (although I suspect the answer might be similar); in the UK we have ‘unadopted roads’ - a private entity builds a little collection of houses served by a road that joins onto the public highway; the new road has a name and is marked on maps and in the post office database and is recognised by local authorities, because all of those things are necessary to one extent or another to make the place functionally live-able - the council needs to know your address to tax you and collect your waste etc.
Sometimes these roads do later get adopted by the local authority, who then takes care of maintenance, but sometimes they remain private and their upkeep is the collective responsibility of the people living in the adjoining houses.
Edit: in the majority of cases here in the UK, unadopted roads are cul-de-sacs - they don’t have any through route to another road, so the only people who end up using them are mostly residents, guests, and people who are lost.
Sure - and if you want to give me useful directions, tell me about those situations. My wife’s aunt lives in a development that’s about 10 years old now but still isn’t properly working on Google Maps. So she will provide useful information - “My address is X but that won’t work right in Maps, use this location pin” or “navigate to this gas station near the entrance of the development and then follow these few simple instructions to reach the house”.
What she doesn’t do is give me a twenty step list of directions for reaching her development from the nearby highway.
And there’s that very strangely hostile attitude I see from both you and the OP.
First, the fact that I find twenty step lists of vague directions less useful than GPS guidance does not mean I lack situational awareness as I drive, and I find the implication quite offensive. A GPS also doesn’t tell you about kids running into the road after their balls; driving with a GPS doesn’t mean you turn off your brain or eyes.
Second, the fact that you and the OP seem to think that death by drowning is a fitting punishment for anyone who isn’t as navigationally gifted as you apparently are is quite disturbing.
That kind of depends on what you mean by “open to the public” - there are private streets in my city that anyone can drive on ( most days - I think they may close one day a year) or walk on but only people who own property in the private community can park on them and that community pays for paving and other upkeep on those streets.
NO! I’m saying if you choose to not believe that people that actually might just might know better than GPS, then you can take a half hour detour, or go down through a farm road that doesn’t even exist, as my own GPS tried to make me do, and get laughed at by everyone.
Because the OP is about someone that drove off a bridge following his GPS. If you’ll notice, I never blamed the GPS or the driver, but the entity that didn’t block the bridge and close the road, because I or anyone at all could have drove off the end of the road, just like the guy, because who would believe a bridge would be out and not blocked. Look at the street views.
Really? Because what you said was:
Hyperbole. it isn’t just for breakfast. Read the rest. And trust the locals.
The entire post reads:
Still seems to me like you’re saying that anyone who trusts the GPS over locals deserves to drown. Hyperbole or not, that’s a curious sentiment. Hyperbole means exaggerating something - so sure, maybe your disdain for people who prefer a GPS to a locals’ ramblings doesn’t actually rise to the level of wanting to see them die horribly, but why have disdain here at all?
In my experience, GPS directions are far more reliable than asking “the locals”, even before you account for the problem of miscommunication. A GPS is far more likely to know about a recent road closure, about heavy traffic, or about alternative routes.
In fact, as I posted earlier, not having to worry about the navigation allows the driver to give more attention to the road in front of them. Looking for landmarks and figuring out where the turn is distracts from operating the vehicle safely, which depends on awareness of the road right in front of you.
You can keep saying that, doesn’t mean its true. This is America, you believe what you want. And with that, I’m done with this conversation.
Now it is you who is ignoring context. Here’s the interesting bit of my post:
Your disdain is quite obvious, but I can understand why you wouldn’t want to address it. It isn’t a great look.
Bye!
It’s real clear that among the folks in the thread we have people who live in older suburbia and people who live in brand new suburbia, people who live in small towns, and people who live in the barely-mapped boonies. Some folks have at least a little experience in other environments, whereas some folks have lived a whole life in just one of those sorts of places.
Assuming a constant degree of skill at personal navigating, the relative value of GPS & online maps, paper maps, and personal knowledge of the local road network varies greatly between those 4 environments. And as we’ve seen, there’s lots of individual variation in personal navigating aptitude, skill, and interest too.
The USA has about 300 million drivers who drive WAG 150 billion miles per year along about 4 million miles of roads. Lotta opportunities over all that driving for just a handful of people someplace some day to have the bad luck of late, dark, rainy, unfamiliar, bad signage, no barricades, and a map that shows a bridge where there isn’t one. Anymore.
I don’t know that we can conclude much beyond “You gotta expect a few losses in a big battle.”
I have a friend who is in this situation, so I can tell you. He bought some land in the Santa Cruz mountains, in California. It is in an unincorporated part of Santa Cruz county. So there is no municipality. There was no road to his property. He decided to build a house there. To get there, he built his own road.
This sort of thing is not unusual in rural parts of the US.
Add to that, the fact that although the bridge is gone, the gaurdrail is still there and extends all the way across the creek. So you’re driving along on a dark, rainy night, you see your headlights reflecting a guardrail that extends up ahead. I can see how that could trick your brain into thinking there was a bridge there even if your headlights weren’t illuminating the surface.
The obvious underlying problem here is that Google’s (and probably everybody else’s) routing algorithm doesn’t have reliable info about which roads are real and reliable and which are not. It’s also the case that in rural and wilderness areas it’s common to have to take the long way to get someplace since it’s the only way. 'Cept for that jeep trail Old Man Jenkins bushwacked back in '67 that everybody knows mostly ain’t real. The algorithm’s desire to find the shortest / quickest route will almost always choose the useless jeep trails because they look good on paper / bits. Just as good as any other county road.
If they chose to simply disable routing in rural or wilderness areas they’d eliminate a lot of the false routes various Dopers have experienced. IOW, treat all those roads as unusable until they are proven somehow to be usable.
OTOH, out in the relatively rural areas is exactly where mapping and routing really delivers value for locals or outsiders alike. Exactly the environment where signage is poor, it’s not obvious how the roads connect to one another etc.
Finding your way around much of gridded urban suburban US is not that hard. Map apps suddenly refusing to do that, instead just dropping a pin at the destination to mark the where and now you’re on your own to figure out the how, would produce a lot of confused drivers at first, but not for long.
For darn sure the number of routes computed each day strongly favors urban / suburban because that’s where the population is.
If somehow Google does get whacked hard in this suit, I could see them simply withdrawing both mapping and routing from anywhere they haven’t run a streetview car along recently. And them de-prioritizing doing that outside major urban / suburban centers and along major highways.
Turning 80% of the land area of the USA into Terra Nullius would not be a good outcome. But would also not be a surprising one.