Our county Board of Elections is in the building that used to be a branch of the library. A new library building opened several years ago, but there’s still a series of signs at the BoE directing wayward visitors half a mile down the road. I’m betting they still get people walking in despite all the signs.
That must be me too.
When I’m wandering around someplace I’ve never been people will come up and ask me for directions. Less often in the GPS + mobile phone era, but it happened a couple days ago.
I’m wandering around a large resort complex I’m staying at, barely able to find my way myself. Their signage is poor at best, and the place is designed to seem bigger than it is by virtue of lots of twisty trails and decorative obstacles. Then some other guest walks up and asks if I know how to get to [wherever]. I point them in the right general direction & send them on their way. Why me?
I get asked, too. My guess is we make eye contact as a stranger approaches, instead of giving off “leave me alone” vibes.
Are things going swimmingly? 
Back when online mapping was still a new thing, I looked up my neighborhood and discovered a road that doesn’t exist - named and everything! It corresponded to a drainage ditch between 2 houses. But since it didn’t really exist, I guess there was never an issue of anyone trying to go there.
Of course if the fake road appeared to connect to two (or more) real roads, the routing algorithm could have tried to send somebody along it on the way to somewhere else.
It’s a bigger risk out in the real boonies, but it only takes one short segment of fake or impassable road in the navigator’s planned route to create a situation where you’ve got a half-hour backtrack to an alternate route that’s actually useable. If you can persuade the computer to ignore the route it wants. Which persuasion used to be a lot harder than it is today.
Nope - the line on the map just ended in the woods between two yards. But not a problem since it would have been impossible to drive there, unless you were stupid enough to go off the side of the road into a ditch/depression/ravine/drainage stream. No one would do that, right??? 
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YkWHFKne4znDHhBd6?g_st=ic
25 years ago in the age of TomTom the GPS, TomTom thought that these two roads connected.
They both actually end in a marsh long before even the current Google Maps shows they end.
Our narrow street has a gap a bit north of our house, presumably to keep traffic coming off the Interstate from driving down it. There’ve been a couple of occasions in the last few years when I’ve had to give people directions to houses on the other side of the gap.
I don’t use GPS, so I don’t know how it is about giving directions to the house. When my wife uses her GPS to drive somewhere, though, it always begins by telling her to drive north to the gap, then turn around and drive south past our house to get to the intersection where we can turn in the correct direction.
A gap in the rhododendrons at this T-junction
has tempted more than one driver to drive straight across into the woods surrounding this private school. Once one of them has done it, and opened up the vegetation, it looks like a track. For a while some temporary barriers were placed there.
For a while Google Maps thought the parking lot in front of Target was actually a road and would constantly try to route me through that parking lot, presumably because it was ever so slightly shorter than using the actual road. That’s not quite as bad, though; at least the parking lot is a thing you can drive on, so it wouldn’t have been a disaster if someone were blindly following Googles directions to the letter. Since I know that area anyway I’d always just drive past the entrance to the parking lot and, if I was using turn-by-turn directions, it would re-route me down the road it should have routed me down in the first place.
If you zoom in closely on current Google maps it’s often entertaining how well it knows the details of available paths within parking lots or even multi-story parking structures. And how well they know the difference between public parking lots and public roads.
But you’re surely right that those details took a long time to be properly captured in the data and properly accounted for in the routing algorithms. And much wackiness ensued before that work was mostly done.
Door Dash drivers seem to have a problem finding this 15 story building sitting on a half lot on the edge of one of the richest neighborhoods in the city. No idea why.
Yeah, same here, but not in the neighborhood, but same general area. I will give some helpful additions to my address. (House on the corner, e.g.)
I (cynically) expect that when they notice it’s a large building they despair at the extra time needed to get from the building lobby to your apartment door, then instead dump your order somewhere and claim it was delivered.
There is a huge disconnect where IMO the delivery company (not driver) ought to be strictly liable for any failure after order pickup on the way into your hands. As long as they can successfully shrug their shoulders and plead stupidity, they will.
I always specify to “hand it to me in the lobby”. They usually eventually find the place but not until driving around in circles for awhile.
Absolutely.
We’re on a corner, and the street which runs along the side of the house is a fairly busy one, and locally fairly well-known. Our front door faces the street which is on the street address, and if I have to describe the location, “the corner of [XX]th Street and [Y] Avenue, brown brick house on the east side of the street” is always enough.
The only time there’s ever been an issue is when delivery drivers or cab drivers have tried to park/let me out on [XX]th Street (the busy street), which is four lanes, but all four of those lanes are traffic lanes: there are no parking spots on that street.