GPS and computer maps have some strange things in them.
The driveway to the old ranch house is listed as a road with a name. The "road "goes past the ranch house to the back of the property through dense brush and a barb wire fence onto the neighbors property. There it goes from the back of his property past his house to his drive way. Down his driveway where the real road ends. It is kinda of funny, because mapp quest will direct you this way from a neighbors house on one side to a heighbors house on the other.
Because a lot of people have little real sense of place. Their only way of getting around is on highest-order roads; all destinations are relative to “exits,” for example. I’ve shown people routes to their own houses that they didn’t even know about.
If my GPS database has an error that yields a bad direction, I want to find that out and correct it precisely, not just for future navigations to that destination, but for all trips through the area. I’d write in a correction on a paper map too. (There’s no way to correct online databases.)
All right. But did you do that immediately, from the car? It’s more work, and maybe a loss of precision, if you have to do it later, and there are plenty of places where mobile net connection is difficult. The database to be corrected in a GPS navigator (or a paper map) is right there in front of you.
I just got a GPS. A hand-me-down from a friend that can’t be updated. So far, I’ve asked it to take me from work to home and from home to the highway. I’m pretty sure I’m taking the shortest/quickest route to my destinations, but it wants to send me to slower, less direct streets. Maybe one day I’ll follow it, but for now, I’m thinking the only thing it’s going to be useful for is getting me back on track after I get myself lost, not for actually finding the best way to my destination.
My parents live between, let’s say, A Street and C Street. The west end of B Street is a block east of them. When I’ve lived there I would occasionally get people saying "don’t you mean between “B Street and C Street?”
As for Brooklyn, I wonder if Google didn’t believe the address existed, so simply plopped its marker down in a random place on the street. Which if the street is, like, Bedford Ave, one subway stop off is actually pretty reasonable.
Even in a large city like Lima (8 million people) with no new roads, GPS can give you a hard time. You can get to my house very easily coming off a the largest highway in Peru, but al GPS device, phones, and web-based programs make you take a much longer route take adds 10 or 15 minutes to your travel.
GPSs are bad with going off the straight route to take a longer but faster route.
My father in law was on the bomb squad and map check squad for the LA olympics. They started a year or so prior sending people out to confirm the maps for LA were correct. He said that there were an amazing number of streets that were never built.
Indeed. When I began mapping towns in New Mexico in the 1990s, it was common to find that 30 percent of the streets shown on the official map simply didn’t exist.
An official map will tell you what’s been dedicated, but not what’s been built. Neither will they show the shortcuts people have created across public land. Aerial photos will show you where people drive, but not whether it’s a street or a shared driveway, and won’t tell you the name. And neither one will tell you if someone has put a barbed-wire fence across the road. Thus the necessity of fieldwork.
Then there’s the German joke about the driver who saw the bridge out ahead, then noticed that his GPS had failed to warn him about it, and decided the best thing to do was drive into the river.
The Navigate app on my Android phone is obsessed with freeways and will take me miles out of the way to make me get on a freeway. I want the most direct route to where I’m going, TYVM, especially during times of day when getting on a freeway basically amounts to parking the car for a while.
Mapquest has been known to try to have me make illegal turns (such as going the wrong way on a one-way street) or try to have me turn at intersections that no longer exist. In the latter case (I was helping a friend move, she was in another car and didn’t have a cell phone), I stopped at a pizza place not far from her new home and threw myself on the mercy of the counter guy for directions. Once he stopped laughing at the Mapquest printout I showed him, he was very kind about getting me aimed correctly.
A colleague’s son was sent hundreds of miles out of his way on an interstate trip because his GPS was inadvertently set to “avoid toll roads”.
I had a devil of a time finding my current work office the first time because I had “no u-turns” set. Took me 3 miles out of the way to do a big loop around.
Garmin maps correctly show that my street is cut in two by a marsh. Tomtom and Google maps do not. I’ve had the call from UPS/Fedex claiming my house doesn’t exist because they wound up coming from the other “my street”. To combat this idiocy, I usually tell people on a phone the nearest cross street (which is the only way to get my half of the street).
I submitted this mistake to Google a long time ago. I even told them to confirm the matter by looking at their own satellite view to see the marsh. Still wrong on their street maps.
Same. I don’t have a stand alone GPS unit and I can’t cope with trusting a GPS and not at least having some kind of mental map of the area and knowing where I am relative to other main roads etc.
So if I’m going somewhere new I do the same. Look up the old street directory book, jump on Google maps and pan in and out so I get a good understanding of exactly where it is, and print out some directions.
If I do get stuck I might pull over and use the GPS on my phone to figure out where I am and then, having the understanding of the surrounds helps me get to where I’m going.
I always like to check the street view when I head to someplace I haven’t been before. It helped a few weeks ago when I was getting confused by the turns when I saw the building and recognized it.
