To be fair to the technology, the GPS works perfectly when it comes to determining your latitude and longitude on the surface of the Earth.
The problem comes when you have to input the information from maps into the database that the GPS receiver will use as grounds for its software to display a map and give directions. There you will have unavoidable human errors, either coding one-way streets as two-way streets (or viceversa), or entering turning points where no legal turns can be made (or viceversa), or marking highway exits as entrances, or… Well, you get the image.
Not to mention the fact that GPS maps become obsolete regularly, whenever new roads are built or re-routed, or streets are changed from two-way to one-way, or streets are renamed or re-numbered. There is a constant process of map revision and re-inputting, and this unavoidably injects errors in the final product.
The GPS is a magnificent invention, but one should use it with care. And, of course, never forget to check your surroundings carefully!
GPS doesn’t find my house, anybody looking for my place has to read the house numbers.
(Nobody ever believes me. I argue the point once or twice, then give up and wait for the call when GPS is done with them)
Which apparently is what happened in the story linked- the house number was there if they had bothered to read it.
In addition to the wrong-way down an entry ramp mentioned in the column, my GPS thinks my daughter’s house is two blocks west of it’s actual location. I have no clue why: the address is the address, etc.
A wonderful tool but not 100% trustworthy. Like most technology. Or like most human beans, for that matter. 
In the UK the authorities have had to put up signs to stop heavy goods vehicles goin along unsuitable country lanes.
Recently a car here was ‘incorrectly’ steered onto a commuter railroad track where it was demolished a bit later by the next oncoming passenger train. Fortunately the driver was able to get herself and her children out of the car in time.
What happened was the actual turn she was supposed to take was maybe 30 yards beyond the railroad track. However when approaching the tracks she heard “Turn” and did so immediately, promptly becoming stuck on the tracks.
I think this is borderline in the ‘knucklehead’ category; it was clearly a railroad crossing with signs, gates, and such. However I can think of other intersections like this where the actual turn-road is even closer to the tracks and it would be desirable if the GPS instructions could somehow be made clearer (“Turn after the railroad tracks”.)
From memory:
I saw one of those investigative news shows (like 20/20 or Dateline) where this woman, her daughter and friend had gotten wrong GPS directions out in the middle of the dessert in Nevada. It kept them so far off the beaten path that they almost died. The only thing that saved them after several days was finding a lone group of trailers that had a tree and some rusty water.
The van was dead and the reason they were even found at all is because at the original destination, the woman had purchased a tshirt at some museum gift shop. The transaction showed where they’d been, so the researchers had a general idea where to search. They were only the last leg of the hunt for them, about to call it off completely, when one of the pilots spotted them from the air. They were in seriously bad shape.
My husband and I joke that our GPS tried to drive us off a cliff in Tombstone, AZ. We found ourselves on a dirt road late at night so we figured we should turn around then…“WTF, is that a cliff?!” The next day we could see it from Boot Hill Cemetary - my husband said “Hey look, that’s where our GPS tried to kill us.”
I have a place I visit every few months, and use the GPS because the route zigzags. Now, every time, the GPS changes the house number I’ve entered and proclaims “you’re here!” 2 blocks away from my destination. Nothing fatal happens, but it is annoying.
From a 2011 story in The Sacramento Bee:
Not quite the same as driving off a cliff or into a lake, but being trapped in a desert without sustenance on the direction of faulty GPS mapping counts, I’d think.
yes it’s the map depiction or directions derived from that is at fault.
i think there have been cases of people driving off a ferry pier or ramp because it is transitable by auto. i don’t have cites or recall details.
And this is in Cecil’s article, but the article itself wasn’t on TSD’s main page when I looked, and I didn’t bother to follow the provided linky, so I didn’t specifically recognize it.
Death Valley Ranger Charlie Callagan has worked with the mapping companies to get the maps fixed so that the Mom and boy getting lost in Death Valley doesn’t happen again.
I have reported a few map mistakes in my time. Once a long time ago when map quest was the thing there was a hiking trail labeled as a road in my home town. People would have had to drive through what was obviously a sidewalk between two houses knocking down fences. I never had the mapping program try to direct me down the road. I never heard back from map quest about this. It seems to have gotten fixed after about 4 years.
The other was a mislabeled street on google maps near my house. About a month after I submitted the report I got an email back saying I was right and the problem would be corrected in a few weeks which it was.
A couple years ago, two women from the mid-west were looking for their hotel in downtown Bellevue. (a suburb of Seattle) They drove into Lake Bellevue, down a boat ramp. Their rental car was completely submerged, but they were rescued by passersby.
It was in the later evening, on a summer night, but it doesn’t get dark here until about 10:00PM mid-summer. It was still daylight when they went in. :smack:
Cecil’s article, while well-researched and fairly thorough, overlooks one aspect. So have the rest of the discussions in this thread.
All the incidents being considered are civilian normal folks being affected by GPS mapping faults.
But GPS was originally a military navigational system. And there are no discussions of military casualties caused by GPS-related issues. The nature of the question in the title of the column doesn’t necessarily preclude it.
So, I’ll start off: A US forward Special Forces firebase called down a B-52 airstrike on itself when the airman coordinating the airstrike changed the battery on his GPS device, which reset it so that it was showing his own position rather than the position of the intended Taliban target it had been showing before he changed the battery. 3 friendlies were killed.
I found a few primary news sources, but I like the Wikipedia writeup better:
Well, back in 1977, I got badly lost on foot in a forest in Massachusetts. It turned out that a lake shown on the USCGS map exists only in April. (I got unlost, once I knew I was lost, by carefully following a straight line, since I knew that, in any direction, I could find a paved road in a few miles; it was Massachusetts, after all, not Alaska.)
Every electronic map I know of, involving a GPS or not, has the house numbers backward on the street in Maine that I grew up in.
I know GPS is a commonly-known acronym now, but I suggest the article use the full phrase “Global Positioning System” at least once, for clarity’s sake.
Our GPS once tried to take us on a “shortcut” to the turnpike, through the backwoods on smaller and then smaller roads, until eventually we found ourselves on a deeply-rutted dirt road. Uh oh. Cue the banjo music. We stopped listening to GPS then, and soon found a much better route on our own.
We were in Philadelphia recently, and found that GPS wasn’t nearly specific enough about which turns to take down small parallel streets. I suspect that older East Coast cities, originally laid out for horses and people on foot, are more prone to this problem.
Surprised he didn’t mention the apple maps debacle that was stranding folks in the outback in a non existent city. Local law enforcement issued an official warning not to use it.
I used to be a long-haul trucker, and this is a much more serious problem for those people for two reasons. First, a long-hauler, unless he has a regular route, likely has no alternative source of mapping information (they do carry atlases, but those don’t show most roads smaller than state highways). And second, many hazards that will wreck a truck (such as sharp turns he can’t make) are preceded by tens of miles of road where once you’re on it, you can’t turn off or turn around (for instance, because both sides of the road are hemmed in by telephone poles for miles and miles).
The problem tends to come up mostly in the eastern US, because most cities in the western US were built recently enough that the planners thought about such things. But in any state on the east coast you really, really don’t want to get off the freeway in an unfamiliar place.
Of course, when it does come up, an experienced driver will stop and call for help. He won’t just assume he can make it through. The people who assume are the people who roll their loads over.
At one time, an auto-body shop was pinned in the middle of the center field in the AAA ballpark in downtown Memphis. I reported this to Google, along with the map settings, zoom level, etc.
It took them two months to respond that the body shop pin was correct because the owner had “verified” its location. Indeed, if looking up this body shop, the correct location was shown on a map, but nevertheless, this same shop ALSO showed up in center field.
I responded to Google, asking them to check the map against the satellite view and confirm that there was, indeed, no auto body shop or any other commercial establishment in the middle of the outfield, just grass.
Four weeks later, Google again confirmed that the information was correct, reassuring me once more, that the address had been verified.
I gave up, but a little over a year later the pin finally disappeared from the outfield. I wonder what it took?
I hear stories about how whacky Google’s job interviews can be. Makes me wonder about the product of those interviews.