Steered Wrong: Drivers Trust GPS Even to a Fault

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

Steered Wrong: Drivers Trust GPS Even to a Fault
Blind Faith in Devices Trumps Common Sense; A Road to Nowhere
By JENNIFER SARANOW
March 18, 2008; Page A1

If your GPS device told you to drive off a cliff would you do it? Norman Sussman nearly did. Mr. Sussman recently queried his GPS for an alternate route home after hitting traffic outside Santa Fe, N.M. Following the machine's directions, he veered up a winding mountain road, expecting to rejoin the interstate. After a half-hour of hairpin turns, Mr. Sussman stepped on the brakes: The road ended at a guardrail and a 200-foot cliff. "It looked like a small version of the Grand Canyon," he says.

(snip)

As GPS devices spread, drivers are finding that satellite navigation may replace paper maps but not common sense. By blindly following the gadgets' not-always-reliable directions, they're getting lost, hitting dead ends, and even swerving into oncoming traffic. Driving the problem are plummeting prices for GPS devices, which have taken the technology more into the mainstream. The average price of a car navigation device over the 2007 holiday season was $225, nearly half what it was the previous year, according to market researcher NPD Group. An estimated 49 million navigation devices, including in-car systems, portable and handheld units and smart phones, will be in use in the U.S. this year, says Telematics Research Group in Minnetonka, Minn.

(snip)

Transportation officials in some cities say wayward GPS users are starting to pose safety problems. Truck drivers erroneously sent to residential streets have crashed into fences and damaged walls and trees on narrow roads. Last May, the North Yorkshire County Council in England put up signs at the entrance to a gravel track declaring it "unsuitable for motor vehicles" after navigation systems had sent drivers on it as a shortcut between two valleys. The rough road quickly turns stony with steep drops in some places, and locals have had to help cars turn around. In Dyke, Va., Stone Mountain Vineyards says it has had so many complaints from visitors who have been led astray by high-tech directions that it recently added a note to its Web site: "Warning: Please follow the driving directions on the webpage. If you use GPS, or services such as MapQuest or Google maps, they WILL send you the wrong way!"

(snip)

Where problems sometimes arise is in the information the devices use to put together a route and come up with directions. Map data companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq have employees in the field recording everything from street names to lane counts and speed limits. To build their map databases, which they supply to GPS makers, they also rely on sources including transportation departments, building associations and public records. But this information can become outdated quickly as businesses move or close shop, new roads are built, and old ones are closed for repairs. Sometimes, addresses are just wrong. In Worcester, Mass., GPS users with a craving for cannolis have pulled up at the home of Thomas and Elizabeth Scano, instead of Scano's Bakery about two miles away.

(snip)



URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120578983252543135.html (subscription)

[kestrel91316]

1. No GPS crutch for me. I prefer to use a map (on paper, gasp!!)

and my eyes and common sense.

[question everything]

4. As former MN governor Jesse Ventura said: the roads in the Twin Cities

may have been designed by a drunken sailor.

Between the river in the middle and freeways that criss cross the place, one can never know when one will end up in a dead end.

So we got our Garmin for Christmas and it has been wonderful. We went to a specialty store in a different part of town and were not sure whey we were doing some zig zagging until we realized that the shop was on a frontage road of a regular road, not even a freeway. Had we just drove to the address, we would have ended up making several U Turns.

[gilpo]

7. He said they were designed by drunken Irishmen....

It got him in a lot of hot water, iirc.

[question everything]

15. Thanks for the correction. Either way, he was right

You really have to know where you are going.

[gilpo]

19. Ain't that the truth...

I always use my GPS when I go downtown SP.

[geardaddy]

21. Here's the Ventura quote

Whoever designed the streets (in St. Paul) must have been drunk. I think it was those Irish guys, you know what they like to do.

- Jesse Ventura on Late Night with David Letterman

On edit: dupe stuff.

[Karenina]

22. My biggest issue with them

is that people are so busy with the GPS, they miss the LANDMARKS.
Then if the gadget glitches they're LOST! :rofl:

Typical conversation...

A: Oh NO! I have to re-program!

B: Hey! Watch the road! I remember the way from here.

A: (fiddles with gadget)

B: Turn left at the corner.

A: Are you SURE?

B: Yes! Don't you remember the firehouse?

A: Sort of... You're sure?

B: YES I'm SURE. Then right after that antique shop.

A: What antique shop?

B: The one I said we should look at next time we're in the neighborhood. Too bad it's Sunday... Weren't you listening? They have a fabulous table in the window.

A: grunt.

B: Another right after the horses, look at all the foals, aren't they sweet? Then we'll see the signs for the autobahn.

A: grunt.

[Warpy]

14. I can't imagine depending on gadgetry

I learned how to read maps years ago, but even up to date maps were often no help in Boston, especially in that land of one way, the wrong way, streets on Beacon Hill. GPS must be useless.

[Winterblues]

17. They are really kewl though

They tell you where food is and whichever type you like, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, american, etc. They tell you where Hotel/Motels are, where shopping malls are, where doctors are, etc. They are extremely valuable when traveling but sometimes they steer you wrong on the road system. Sometimes they have roads in their system that have been gone for years and sometimes they don't even show a road. The new ones though allow you to upgrade often.

[Mojorabbit]

2. I was in Germany last year

and my sis who was driving punched in the name for a fairly large town and set it for the center of town. We drove up and down mountains with hairpin turns, it was getting dark, when the gps woman's voice told us we had arrived. Sheer drop off on one side down a mountain, and fields and cows on the other side of the road. Ha!

[B Calm]

3. I know some truck drivers who bought a GPS and ended up with

a high dollar ticket for driving down a road with weight limits. One guy up in Chicago was driving down Pulaski street and was pulled over and got a six thousand dollar overweight fine. He turned the ticket in to his employer, and the employer told him it was his responsibility to pay it! Imagine going to work at your job and getting a six thousand dollar fine for a mistake!

[question everything]

6. Wow! That's steep

but I suppose, if the fine were only $100 and if driving that road really saves time, many would just continue doing so.

[mdmc]

5. Go around the lake, AROUND!

Anyone watch the Office?

[gilpo]

8. That's what I thought of when I saw this thread n/t

[LakeSamish706]

9. Just rented a car in Vegas to drive to Palm Springs and had a GPS...

I absolute loved it... Gave me one wrong road number, but it didn't alter the course at all...

[ThomWV]

10. I've been using GPS since its introduction

I used to fish off shore (small boat) a good bit and so I was happy to get rid of my old LORAN-C and switch over to GPS. It was an instant improvement over the old system in every way. My first unit was a hand held with an axillary power supply (cigarette lighter plug-in) and so I used it in my vehicles right from the start. This was before mapping even existed on them and some didn't even show track plots. Anyway successive units came with maps and then great amounts of built in memory and finally the navigation software they have now days that plots routes. Of all the good things they did with GPS have to say they really did drop the ball with routing. I find it so annoying that I keep the routing turned off and just use the map to show me where I am.

[hootinholler]

16. From a computational aspect

Routing is just hard.

-Hoot

[ThomWV]

18. No doubt at all about that

I could see that it took a lot more brainpower than I have to do the programming to make it work. I can sort of see, in my mind's eye, how it would be achieved but that's about it. I admire the folks that do it. However that doesn't make the machines any more useful. I think when they annoyed me most was when I could see that the routing was going to take me somewhere or someway other than what I could see would be best. Often this was because of changes of road access because of construction of course, but sometimes it was programming logic that seemed to show thinking that secondary roads were of the same value as primary roads. The first place I really noticed it was around Buffalo, NY. The GPS would have happily given me the scenic tour of the town when all I wanted to do was set foot in Canada. I could actuall see where I needed to go to get to a bridge over the river to the left, but the GPS was telling me to take a right.

[RichardRay]

23. Har, har, har..

Shown to be np-hard, I believe. For those who never took Theory of Computation, that's REALLY hard.

[hootinholler]

26. :D

No pun intended, and I think the correct technical phrase is really fucking hard.

-Hoot

[LisaM]

11. The one time a friend and I used one (in a rental car) I hated it!

We were in the LA area. The first time, it got us to where we were going, though at one point we realized that we were following it so blindly we had no idea where we were.

Later, to avoid coming back the same way, we asked for the shortest route, and it put us on a toll road, without mentioning the fact that there would be a number of toll stops (though at that, it was a much pleasanter route).

Later, we were attempting to find the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena. It would not find them for us. It just wouldn't. They weren't listed in its directory, and the car basically refused to take us there. So we gave up, and decided to go the Santa Monica beach instead.

It got us to Santa Monica just fine. Then my friend (who was driving) said, "punch in how to get to the beach! I need to know how to get to the beach!" Then we looked up over our heads, and there were actual street signs with arrows that said, "BEACH". We both burst out laughing at that.

Where it did do a good job was getting us back to the rental car place. It took us there directly and efficiently. I'm surprised it didn't eject us from our seats when we arrived!

[Karenina]

24. Toll roads in the Southland?

When did THAT happen?

[question everything]

25. Oh, yes. When they ran out of money thanks to, among other things, Prop. 13

And then came the collapse of the Soviet Union that ended up all the good jobs associated with the Aerospace industry. The last freeway is the 105, going east-west to LAX. Took about 20 years, I think, to finish, at a cost of $150 million, I think.

Since then, especially in Orange County, all the new roads are toll roads. And, funny thing, there was also a non-compete agreement where one of the roads - Jamboree - was not going to be extended in parallel as to not compete with the toll road. I don't know if this still holds.

By the time we left, in 2002, the toll roads were losing money but I don't know how it is now. I know that the first one, with inside lanes being toll, going to Riverside County, did not have a toll booth, you had to have that transporder on your windshield which we did not have, not using this road on a regular basis, even though I would have paid for that one time.

[madinmaryland]

12. If people would just spend a couple of minutes researching where

they were going, they might not have as many problems. Obviously there are times you can't, but most people have access to the internets, so they could at least have a general idea where they are going.

:shrug:

[Tracer]

13. These GPS things are SO annoying!

Last Saturday, I shared a ride with a woman who had one.

The "voice" kept shouting where to turn IN OUR OWN NEIGHBORHOOD! After listening to it for 6 or 7 turns, I asked the woman (who I don't know that well) to shut the damn thing off. She silenced the voice, but not the GPS.

I knew where we were going and what highway to take.

The GPS instructed her to take a SIDE ROAD instead of the INTERSTATE -- which would have taken us at least an hour longer.

Don't people read maps anymore?

[flowomo]

20. I love my GPS.... but you have to keep an eye on her....

my TomTOM One 3rd Edition speaks in the voice of the Queen of England (when we aren't using Dr. Evil, Capt. Picard or some other voice)..... and she is 99% good as gold. But sometimes.... well, we haven't driven off a bridge, but my brother was using it in New Hampshire last week and it drove him to the edge of a bridge that was washed out in a flood three years ago.