22-year-old driver shot to death when GPS directs him to the wrong driveway:
Just about every year someone gets stuck in the snow on a logging trail in southern Oregon. To accomplish this, you have to break the chain on a gate that says “Closed of the winter” or drive around it. But it happens over and over. People have died trying to walk out after getting stuck.
Rule #1 of GPS: Never, never use ‘shortest route’ in an area you do not know.
Mapping errors are abundant and impossible to correct. There’s a short-cut near my home that goes across the bridge on Steel Bridge road, except the bridge was taken down in 1942! My attempts to correct this are ignored.
A friend of mine who had a rocket launch at White Sands reports that it’s impossible to find the location using GPS: Any attempt will send you in the opposite direction. This is probably intentional, though, given that it’s ultimately a military system, and White Sands is a military facility.
There have been some threads about stoopid GPS stuff. See my post, #10, in this thread about the weird psychology of people and GPS (which can of course turn out to be fatal at times).
A Canadian couple in 2011 got lost when following their GPS. After 3 days, he took off looking for help, with the GPS, trail mix and water. 48 days later, she was rescued in the car where she had remained, surviving on trail mix and melted snow. His body was found 18 months later. This happened in Oregon.
Of course, that ballpark is called AutoZone Park. I wonder if that had anything to do with the confusion.
And the Google people were laughing their heads off at how pwned Apple’s maps were until a week later when another local law enforcement warning about Google maps stranding people in another location in the outback… One thing everyone agrees upon: You certainly have a lot of outback out back there in Australia.
I like Google maps because of street view. I go to my computer, check directions using Google maps, and then verify suspicious turns and my final location with street views.
That entrance ramp on the Interstate? It ends up being the wrong way and wants me to cross over 3 lanes of traffic and over a barrier.
That left turn in New Jersey? Nope: There’s a no left turn sign right there. Looks like I should take the jug handle on the right 100 feet up.
Is that the restaurant I’m going to? Not unless it changed its name to First National Bank and is now offering free checking.
*As a result the supposedly fastest transit route has you getting off the train and taking a neighborhood bus, which no one with a clue would actually do. *
I do this all the time. I take the Blue Line from the airport to, let’s call it Montrose, because that’s not the stop. I get off and take the Montrose bus (no I don’t, it’s a different bus) to Paulina (not) and walk from there. I can’t think of a way to get home that involves nothing but trains that won’t take me all the way downtown and transferring to a Brown Line train.
The GPS in a car uses mostly mathematical shortcuts to figure out where it is. Truly precise GPS work requires allowing the stationary device to track the satellites for several minutes. With the car based unit, it calculates its position within 60 feet, and snaps to the nearest road. At highway speeds, it really doesn’t make a difference, but at city-street speeds, it may very well think it is at the intersection, even if 30 feet before.
Even that doesn’t always work. I was looking up restaurants, went to street view image for the address listed, it showed some other restaurant building. When driving to that location and looking around, the store I wanted was in a shopping center building across the parking lot, not in sight on the “street view” picture of the address listed for the store.
For each segment of streets in the map database, there is a starting and ending number. For instance, on the “400’s” block on a street in a city, it will start with say "5"and end at “95”, and then approximate where an address will fall in between.
If each yard is perfectly uniform in width along the street, then it will be a good approximation. If the widths vary, then the address could be off by a few or many houses. If the street segments are too long or don’t have correct start and end numbers, then the approximation may be entirely off.
Yes, that’s the first one I thought of:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/10/01/albert-chretien-body-found.html
It got national news coverage in Canada.
I also heard of problems with tourist busses or big trucks being directed into narrow lanes in England where they actually became stuck - but that may be apocryphal.
My favourite story about GPS was driving from NJ into Philadelphia - the GPS told us to “go straight and onto the Lincoln Branch”. I guess someone couldn’t keep their abbreviation “BR” straight at TomTom.
My dad is the biggest tech geek I’ve known in my life (he owns several IPhone/IPad-like devices and is the first person in the whole extended family to buy an electric car), and you could not give a GPS to him today.
Yeah, he tried. The best case scenario was taking about 50% longer to find the place than he would with a well-drawn map. There were some real facepalm moments, like guiding him off the freeway and then right back on. The worst-case scenario was not finding the location at all and having to go all over the general vicinity or ask a helpful pedestrian. And this is Oahu, a place that does not have 100-mile freeways, ferry routes, train crossings, abandoned mine roads, or sprawling, scorching hot deserts.
Even before considering details like map changes or mistaking corporate sponsorship with the corporation’s actual operation, there’s always one big problem with GPSs, that they need to direct you to a location while you are in a moving vehicle. If it were possible to map out the entire trip before setting off, there might be some merit (given a dependable navigator and patience). But trying to get you where you need to be while coping with variable speeds and the always unpredictable factor of traffic…not likely.
It may sound harsh, but overreliance on an inherently unreliable technology is just cold Darwinism in action. If the worst-case scenario is death, you’d better not put all your eggs in that basket, ‘sall I’m sayin’.
P.S. What that Ohio bank did was absolutely inexcusable and they deserve whatever legal and financial reaming they get.
Which is not a good argument to put none of your eggs in that basket. It is a tool, which demands a modicum of common sense. Those without that blessing will be road kill no matter how they find their way around.
I find TomTom’s iPhone app quite reliable. For that matter, even Apple Maps, after its shakedown period, has worked fairly well, except that its points-of-interest database is still absolutely vile. I’ve been using GPS since 1998 (back in those days, you needed a laptop with a CD drive and a basic GPS receiver bigger than today’s wholly integrated GPS devices, which plugged into the serial port to communicate with the laptop and plugged parasitically into the mouse port to get power), and I’ve always found GPS highly useful—if applied sensibly.
To be extremely picky, this happened in Nevada, not Oregon. Not that state boundaries matter all that much, the Owyhee wilderness is not a good area to get stranded in.
Most GPS’s I’ve seen do indeed allow you to view the entire route, or at least a list of directions, which allows you to get a general idea of where you’re going and compare the GPS route with your own knowledge of the roads. The fact that most people ignore this feature, and just punch in their destination and go, blindly following every move (like getting off and then back on the freeway, which if you’d thought it out beforehand you wouldn’t do), is not the GPS’s fault.
And settings such as choosing the shortest route over the fastest route, or avoiding tolls or freeways, can sometimes produce odd results. It really helps to learn about and understand the tool before using it.
Spam reported.