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Drivers followed a Google Maps detour and ended up stuck in an empty field
- gnrlst 7y agoReminds of a scene in The Office where Michael blindly follows the SatNav into the lake. In all seriousness, unless I knew the area very well, it would have happened to me as well.
- blang 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY
- gk1 7y agoTitle is borderline clickbait. Google Maps routed people through what turned out to be a dirt road. It just so happened that recent rains made the road muddy and impassable for smaller cars... Then once a few cars got stuck, a traffic jam formed behind them.
- elicash 7y agoTitle describes very literally what happened. It's a fun story. It's also a private road and it's unclear whether it's supposed to be open to the public.
- shereadsthenews 7y agoArticle doesn't indicate the road is private. How do you know? As a backcountry motorcyclist I'm accustomed to coming upon roads that are "private" because some rancher decided to hang a sign but in reality it's a public right-of-way. Also as a backcountry motorcyclist I'm smart enough to not drive a Prius down a mud trail. Not sure what is wrong with people today. We have more information than ever, we should be making better decisions than ever, but the truth is the opposite.
- rhacker 7y agoIt is mentioned in the video
- smhenderson 7y ago"We have more information than ever" IMO that's the issue. People get so overly confident that the source of that information is never wrong so they blindly trust it. It's if the more info someone has the less critical thinking they will do.
- bradstewart 7y agoBe careful ignoring those "private" signs though. I ignored such a sign in south Texas, took a dirt road (in a 4x4) that was mapped as a public road (both on paper and Google), only to have a rifle shot cross my path about 5 minutes later. Ended up having a fairly civil conversation with the "owner" before turning around, but he was adamant that I was on private property and would not be allowed to continue.
- lgunsch 7y agoThat sounds extreme, but does indeed play into the stereotype of a Texas rancher. I'm in Canada, and if you shoot someone on your land who's not threatening you with a weapon - chances are you will go to jail because it's not reasonable force.
- bradstewart 7y agoIt is certainly a bit extreme. To be fair, it was clearly a warning shot fired a "safe" distance ahead of me. Most of the folks I've met in rural Texas aren't itching to shoot anyone and everyone, but they do value privacy to an extreme and will go to great lengths to protect what is (in their mind) theirs.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoCurious whether the owner thought that shooting across car hoods was going to get Google to stop routing cars across his land. Did the owner know it was Google's "influence" causing people to trespass? If so had the owner informed Google?
- isostatic 7y agoGoogle may send people the wrong way, but the choice to drive in a muddy field is the driver, and driver's alone
- 3JPLW 7y agoI'm more sympathetic. I can imagine being in that situation — going down a dirt road — and laughing at the absurdity of it all and yet needing to get to the airport to catch a flight and not having any better options. I'd wager it didn't get muddy immediately upon starting down that road. Once it did, though, it was probably too late with a line of cars behind you and nowhere to go but forward.
- _nalply 7y agoOnce it happened to me that it got too sandy too sudden and I got stuck. It is easy to make fun of such mishaps but hey shit happens. It happened even without Google Maps.
- alistairSH 7y ago...yet needing to get to the airport to catch a flight... You could leave a little earlier. But, more generally, I agree. It's hard not to follow the GPS and road conditions can change rapidly. My own anecdote... driving along 495 outside DC, there's a crash on the Woodrow Wilson, and the GPS says "take some side roads" to all 10,000 of us on that stretch of interstate. Massive gridlock ensues, not just on the interstate, but also all the surrounding neighborhood roads as cars tried to pass through parking lots and alleys to get home.
- frogpelt 7y agoIt was the 99 other cars that gave them the courage. I've faced the same situation but I was alone, and I didn't take the dirt road.
- isostatic 7y agoWell at least something to pass the time 99 cars stuck in the field, 99 stuck cars turn one round, drive it arround, 98 stuck cars in the field....
- trdtaylor1 7y agodeleted
- bryanlarsen 7y agoAnd then go to jail for 30 years because you get charged with "hacking" rather than going to small claims court for Fraud under $5000.
- hirundo 7y agoTravelling from Durango Colorado to Reserve New Mexico, Google Maps routed me to a "road" that was simply a dry stream bed, in the middle of a large Indian reservation, in high desert wilderness, many miles from any human habitation. It happened gradually. First I was directed to a well maintained gravel road, then to dirt track, which slowly faded away to nothing. I was driving a 4x4, had an almost full tank, a load of groceries in back and plenty of time, so I went with it for quite a while. There are lots of long dirt tracks in this area and I kept hoping that it was still a short cut. The shortest alternate route was around 90 minutes longer. I think most travelers would have bailed at the first turn off of the pavement. I waited until the stream bed sand was getting deep before turning around. But for some optimistic, mobility impaired person, it could have been a death trap. I've adjusted my expectations of Google Maps accordingly.
- geggam 7y agoIf you run across an abandoned car in those washes do not investigate yourself. Report to the police. Drug runners will drop cars off to be picked up and have some dude off in the distance watching the car. Getting nosey can get you shot.
- notJim 7y agoYeah, Google Maps does this kind of thing routinely in my experience. I've had it direct me down muddy dirt roads because they were 2 minutes faster than the paved road, or direct me down forest roads that didn't exist anymore or were only for loggers. I've learned to approach the directions it gives me with skepticism.
- mywacaday 7y agoI just got offered google Maps beta this morning, this could be fun.........
- Tempest1981 7y agoIt is tempting to "follow the herd". I guess sometimes optimism gets you in trouble.
- raverbashing 7y agoYeah... a GPS is not a substitute for awareness and your brain. Recently I've been to some places with GPS, it is a major help, but sometimes you need to stop, see that it's leading you into a wrong path (it can be for a multitude of reasons like city works or you did something wrong before) and correct course.
- pdonis 7y agoSatellite view can help with this. I always use it when I'm trying to figure a route in an area I'm not familiar with; it's a lot easier to tell that something's fishy from a photo.
- frogpelt 7y agoI've taken a Google Maps detour before and I'm amazed at the number of other cars that are also apparently following the same route. It can be hard to not follow a crowd in those situations.
- devchix 7y agoYears ago around the Apple Maps fiasco, I read a very good article titled (paraphrased) "Why people follow GPS into very obviously bad places". At the time there were reports of people driving into empty fields, lakes, despite very obvious visual cues that they were about to drive into fields, lakes. The reasons were primarily the implicit trusts people have in computers, and secondarily, the ur-map on which all maps were built had roads marked but not necessarily their usability. A map would contain a secondary road which would be closed in winter due to snow, but path-finding software will not know this. The article detailed a case of a couple (I think?) following such a path to their deaths - by the time they began having doubts about the GPS, they were too far enmired in their situation to turn around and save themselves. I regret not being able to find that article again, I thought it was at Wired or The Atlantic.
- benou 7y agoSounds like ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/death-by-gps/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/death-by-gps/
- m463 7y agoI can't help think of "electric car caught fire" ignoring how many non-electric cars catch fire. Haven't people died following paper maps, or even reading signs?
- rootusrootus 7y agoI remember it happening in Oregon a few years back: https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2012/10/missing_canadian_businessman_a.html https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2012/10/mi...
- JakeWesorick 7y agoDo not read. Very sad.
- taborj 7y agoI remember hearing about that as it happened. It was the first one I remember seeing that was widely distributed to the various news outlets.
- mannykannot 7y agoFor better or worse, Google probably has all the data needed to avoid routing a lot of vehicles down a little-used dirt track, even if it is not explicitly flagged as such in its database.
- human20190310 7y agoIt's like a Stanley Milgram experiment where people just do what the authoritative GPS voice tells them to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
- behringer 7y agoOne of my favorite scenes on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY The title of the video really ruins it, but it was amazingly funny when I saw it the first time not knowing what to expect :D
- erobbins 7y agoI prefer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0Qvc6_MfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0Qvc6_MfQ :)
- bdamm 7y agoI just had this happen the other day, but with Google bicycle directions. It looked like a good shortcut, until I was deep in the woods hiking up a trail with my bicycle over my shoulder, and only then did I realize what a lemming I had become. It was the hope that there was a good shortcut (and it would have been if it had worked out) that kept me going.
- nradov 7y agoUnfortunately Google Maps cycling directions don't reliably differentiate between flat paved bike paths versus steep dirt single tracks that only a pro mountain biker could handle. It would be nice if there was an option to limit routing on that basis.
- kalleboo 7y agoGoogle cycling directions don't exist in my country but does it really not show/optimize for elevation changes? I use a local navigation app and the options you select between all show an elevation curve, I thought that was the whole point of a cycle route option!
- bdamm 7y agoYes it does, but there are cases where a steep single track through a hazardous forest is “better” than a steep and longer paved alternative. And it may be better... in daylight.
- gpm 7y agoMy favorite google bicycle direction was to ride up to a subway station via a parking lot, go down into the subway and up out the other side. Technically valid, but damn did I feel stupid.
- _0ffh 7y agoFor me it once turned out that a short ~25m connecting path between two roads was an old overgrown flight of stairs in the side of a hill, inclined by about 45 degrees...
- segmondy 7y agoWhen watching a movie, hackers would hack the traffic lights to cause chaos. I can't wait to see a twist, hack Google maps instead.
- geggam 7y agoPlot twist : Google is doing it on purpose
- maxxxxx 7y agoHappened to me in Monza, Italy after the F1 race. A whole line of cars went down ever smaller roads until it was so narrow that only a bike or pedestrian could fit through. Getting 100+ cars to back up took a very, very long time.
- jstarfish 7y agoWhen Atlanta iced over a few years ago, there were many similar predicaments made all the worse when the driver of the last car in the stack would get themselves stuck trying to do a three-point turnaround and trap everybody ahead of them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hodgesrm 7y agoErrors in GPS systems are common enough that various US state and local departments of transportation have developed special warning signage. Here's one for the Mormon Emigrant trail in the California Sierra Nevada: https://www.facebook.com/eldoradonf/posts/morman-emigrant-trail-two-wheel-drive-and-all-wheel-drive-vehicles-are-prohibite/912508805550215 Even so, every year people still drive past the sign trying to get through to Carson Pass.
- tom_ 7y agohttps://www.facebook.com/eldoradonf/posts/morman-emigrant-trail-two-wheel-drive-and-all-wheel-drive-vehicles-are-prohibite/912508805550215 https://www.facebook.com/eldoradonf/posts/morman-emigrant-tr...
- hodgesrm 7y agoThanks. I thought HN has having an antibody response to the Facebook URL. It seems more likely that indenting caused it to render as code.
- drone 7y agoThis happens more often than not on my trips through more rural areas (once, it sent me through a muddy corn field to avoid a traffic jam on Christmas night in rural Louisiana -- fortunately I understood what I was getting in to and had a vehicle equipped to handle it), and I've noticed it seems to have more to do with people who have google maps keeping their phones with them. That is to say, it tracks where people drive, and when people drive in the same place often, it flags it as a common route and therefore must be a road! I have a hunting lease in rural Texas, and the most common trails within the property are all highlighted as roads in Google maps. In fact, as I cleared out a trail a year ago and started using that trail as a way to reach one point on the ranch, it has now also become highlighted! You'd be a fool to cut someone's locked gate to take such a route, but it does offer them as routes to me were I to ask how, for example, to arrive at the entrance gate of the property north of us. The only legal (and passable) route is actually to go south, then east, then north, then west. However, google maps says "Hey, just take this trail straight north."
- notatoad 7y ago>That is to say, it tracks where people drive, and when people drive in the same place often, it flags it as a common route and therefore must be a road! do you know this to be true, or are you just guessing?
- jerf 7y agoWell, between "Google is tracking people with cell phones to look at their common patterns and doing AI on the data", "Google actually sent out a surveyor to a hunting lease to track this guy's new trail", or "Google purchased someone else's survey of the new hunting trail", I find the first one most plausible by quite a bit. I live in a less rural area but I've still noticed a handful of things in my area marked as more complete roads than they should be. Nobody in person would mistake them for even the lowest grade of official road in use around here.
- notatoad 7y agoI find "google purchased a set of map data that said this creek bed was a road" to be much more plausible than any other scenario
- Alupis 7y agoWhat happens in the Utopian future of fully autonomous cars (level 5) which heavily rely on GPS for route mapping and positioning? Isn't the dream to be able to sit in the back seat and read a book or take a nap? The human occupant might not be aware anything's wrong until the vehicle is running out of battery or gas, or gets stuck in the sand (from the parent's experience). There's a pass through the mountains near me that gets shut down during the winter due to snow every year. I go up there usually but don't need to go all the way through - and was surprised this year to see an official CalTrans sign saying: "Your GPS is lying to you! The pass is closed! Turn back!" I suppose enough people every year ignore the road closure signs and continue all the way until they get stuck... how would an autonomous vehicle know any better either?
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoHopefully the state DOT will have a way of communicating with self driving vehicles directly without needing to go through a company like google first.
- bdamm 7y agoDefinitely this will be a failure case. Another failure will be "loops" where the car ends up driving the same few miles repeatedly - I've seen this failure mode in Google Maps as well. However, the navigator and the driver are separate components, so even if the navigator says to drive off the gaping hole in the bridge, the driver will hopefully recognize the fault and bring the car safely to a stop. But definitely we will see the "German family dies in death valley due to navigator failure" headline.
- egl2019 7y agoIt's called "Death by GPS".
- m3kw9 7y agoThe first instinct of moderners will be to snicker at the Pokémon fad
- geggam 7y agoAs a note in Arizona _MOST_ of the roads on google maps are going to be barely improved or not improved dirt roads / washes where people drive You have been warned :)
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoI really hope some of the people who crap up 4x4 related web forums with comments like "lockers are way too harsh for a daily driver" got stuck in that but that would be too good to be true.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y agoUnlikely. And they're wrong: I had a locker in the rear end of my Toyota for years and it was my daily driver all that time. Barely noticed it.
- alistproducer2 7y agoWas rv'ing in utah and Google maps tried to take me through some field via a dirt road in the middle of the night.
- wwweston 7y agoA GPS app is not just a convenience, but a fantastic convenience in a major metro area like Los Angeles where good routing through traffic conditions can save a half hour or more. But even here, where you'd think the map coverage would be near strongest, I've occasionally had an app attempt to route me down a private drive or a fire road. In fact, if you look for hiking trailheads frequently enough, I'd be surprised if it doesn't happen to you. That's a class of cases where I'd hope most users are keeping their head about them as they travel; hiking as recreation requires that of its participants. Still, edge cases matter, and the closer we get to a world of autonomous vehicles, they matter more.
- yohann305 7y agoCould be the starting plot of an amazing "Black Mirror" episode!
- reedlaw 7y agoI wonder what OpenStreetMaps shows for the detour. I find OSM often more detailed than Google Maps.
- jakecopp 7y agoAt least if it's wrong you can change it!
- stcredzero 7y agoWhat Google Maps has done to me, personally, over the years: 1) Sent me back across the San Mateo bridge unnecessarily while driving to a date. 2) Sent me to a different building on the opposite side of the highway, 1.4 miles away, while driving to a job interview. 3) Sent me to a different building on a different block while walking to a job interview.
- axiom92 7y ago>1) Sent me back across the San Mateo bridge unnecessarily while driving to a date Woah. I felt bad for you just reading this. That's at least a hit of 30 min (if you have to go to cross the bridge and come back). If this happened during commute hours, this could be a 1.5 hour delay! EDIT: I guess it happens a lot to people unfamiliar with the area going to Foster City via 92 east. If you miss the last exit, you have to take a 14 mile U turn!
- phaedrus 7y agoWhen I was a poor college student I had a GPS map (probably a Tom Tom at that time) do the "route you in a cycle" glitch over a toll bridge multiple times. I was already down to my last dollar(s) so I had a bit a of a "Charlie on the MTA" moment wondering if I was going to end up stuck on the wrong side of the bridge without enough money to leave the island it led to.
- notahacker 7y agoGoogle Maps managed to find me an apartment building in Bangkok which vaguely resembled the airline office it was supposed to be sending me to, just in time for a very nice guy to exit and offer me a lift to where it actually was, over a mile away :)
- mattbee 7y agoHaha yup, on the way back from a beach in Kefalonia, Maps took my family & our hire car onto a track that a goat would have thought twice about - gradually going from tarmac to gravel to dirt on the side of a very steep hill. The car ended up bouncing hard into several craters - if we hadn't been going verrrry slowly we could have ended up sliding down it. I wondered when we arrived why the hire was 300EUR for a week, and the car was still a terrible old piece of junk ... so when I handed it back and pointed out the dent in the bottom panel the hire guys grinned and said "have a great flight home!" Thanks for the holiday memories, Maps!
- cjfd 7y agoWell, the map is not quite the territory. I remember a time on holidays where we were not really trusting the street that the TomTom had selected for us. So I walked ahead a bit... turned out we were supposed to drive down some stairs.... really steep stairs too...
- jpindar 7y agoThis doesn't look like the road to the airport. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.8127579,-104.7167676,3a,75y,67.21h,85.11t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssswaKKvsDbpN4k9v9BgPSw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.8127579,-104.7167676,3a,75y,... Google Maps shows that the road ends there. There's a parallel paved road a mile south, which even has signs for the airport. Both routes are about the same length. Edit: Hang on, Google Maps is using some (at least) five year old imagery in their satellite view, and possibly for their routing. The roads in that area were a bit different then compared to later images from Google Earth, so the dirt road would have been about 0.8 miles shorter. I wonder if this sort of thing accounts for many GPS glitches?
- upofadown 7y agoThe root problem is that some roads are weather dependent. We know where the rain and snow end up (weather radar). We just need a model based on drying/melting to know when the road exists again.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoIn the name of all the farmers who earn good money by dragging people out of snow and mud, misguided by google maps, i would like to thank google. My father regularly drags people out of 2ms of snow in winter, when a given up road is proposed to people who want to take a shortcut.
- dzhiurgis 7y agoCan someone related to Google answer me - why doesn't Google have an option to "Avoid unpaved roads"?
- stunt 7y agoI had a similar experience when I was traveling in Bali Indonesia rural areas.
- anm89 7y agoI drove a motorcycle from northern Colombia to Central Peru on a motorcycle and some of the absolute best and worst moments of my life came from bizarre and non existent roads that Google sent me on. Many of them ended of being goat and cow trails that google mistook as roads, ironically most of the time there was a perfectly good highway nearby but Google would notice some dirt path directly through a mountain pass looked just a little bit closer. I documented one of these sidetracks: https://andrew-max.github.io/adventure/2017/03/24/huamachuco-cabana/ https://andrew-max.github.io/adventure/2017/03/24/huamachuco...
- chishaku 7y agoCould be worse... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS
- chillwaves 7y agoI had a terrible experience with Google maps recently. Re-routed me (and dozens or hundreds others) into a neighborhood that could not handle the traffic. Literally we are now in bumper to bumper gridlock in the tightest residential streets, with no shoulders (imagine being stuck in your driveway due to this). What's more, the "short cut" ultimately ended up feeding into the main traffic jam anyway so even in best case scenario it would not have saved time. The real problem with the short cut is it was not announced or optioned in my g maps via Android Auto, instead given as a primary route. I noticed it was different (but started on a major highway) and didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. Also G maps had me cross over 4 lanes of traffic in rush hour over a 50 foot distance to make a left turn. Their algo has gotten more aggressive and not for the better.
- cecilpl2 7y agoSounds like someone at Verizon messed up their BGP system.
- chillwaves 7y agoI'm not posting to complain but I was sympathetic to the neighborhood that had a flood of cars being directed by google. At one point, someone was either moving in or out and had one side of the road blocked and this caused a major problem for the hundreds of cars in the google short cut caravan.
- hnick 7y agoIt frequently wants me to turn across a 4-lane road near my home here in Sydney. This is fine on Sunday morning or at night, not so much at other times. It also wants me to spend >$10 on tolls to save 2 minutes over a 30-minute drive on some routes. I wish there were a way to make it ignore tolls unless it saves a significant amount of time.
- erinaceousjones 7y agoOn the maps app, when on the route planning screen ("from" and "to" with the map showing candidate routes), right of the "from" box there's one of those triple-dot menu buttons. "Route Options" modal lets you check "Avoid toll roads". On web maps, there's also an "OPTIONS" link that expands to show the same stuff. It has some useful features that can go completely undiscovered because they're hidden in screens you wouldn't go on if you're sitting in your car getting ready to drive. Waze has the same options and in my opinion are better presented, since it's much more tailored towards driving navigation. Also, reading this HN thread, I'm glad I'm on a small island with exceedingly well-documented road systems (UK). I think you'd have to be in the northernmost parts of Scotland to really have an issue with dumb route planning here. Had a fun experience when exploring the island of Gran Canaria, where maps wanted us to drive our small rear-wheel-drive rental car down what felt like a 60 degree hill, what was essentially a riverbed with tree roots sticking out of it. Some people on quad bikes had to wait for us to crawl down it with foot constantly on the brakes. Maps had marked it as not even a trail or a small road or whatever but a bonafide 2-lane road!
- macandcheese 7y agoAs a counterpoint, I was once driving across the country with my Father in a rented Kia Forte, heading West to Oregon. Neither of us had a smart phone at the time, having lived in a rural area on the East coast with little cell phone service - so we relied on an old paper map, a Rand McNally or something like it, to deliver us to the West Coast As we were driving West through Nevada, we reached Winnemucca - and faced a decision. We could detour severely south via route 80 to Reno, and head back North, or take route 49, which looked to be on the map an improved road, in more or less our direction of travel. Turns out that this "Jungo Road" was really nothing more than a heavily rutted dirt road past some seemingly abandoned mines, that skirted the Black Rock Desert and served as an access road to where Burning Man is held. A few hours of skull rattling bumpy road and one super dirty rental car air filter later, we finally emerged back onto a nicely paved road near Gerlach.
- aidenn0 7y agoGoogle Maps directed me off of a plowed mainroad onto a non-plowed side road; in the middle of summer it still would not have been faster than the main road. As it was, one of the other cars redirected was not carrying chains (despite giant "Chains required at all times" signs on the way up the mountain), and there was insufficient room to pass. Adding insult to injury, they passed me while I was chaining up. Fortunately a local with a bucket of rock-salt was able to get them unstuck and back down the mountain. Cost me about 45 minutes though.
- trustfundbaby 7y agoI have to say this has happened increasingly over the last 2-3 years ... or lets just say I've only just noticed this then, as I moved to a new city and was a digital nomad for a bit, so I had to rely on google maps in new and unfamiliar cities more often than I normally would have. Before that I could pretty much rely on Google maps to get me to my destination without any trouble at all. I wonder what changed? or if its been this way all along.
- fluffything 7y agoI ride a road bike for 200-300km each week. Sometimes I don't know where I am and need to use Google maps. I use it only for finding out where I am, and then navigate myself. I have zero trust in the recommended routes. I always choose "Car" as a vehicle so that Google Maps only shows me roads, but you wouldn't believe the number of times that Google maps has recommend me short cuts through 5km long dirt roads or longer. It happens a couple of times per month. With a car those shortcuts might have worked, but with a road bike 5km dirt road is a no go. Every time I choose "Bicycle" I essentially get recommended 100km of dirt roads. The app is completely useless for road cycling. Earlier this year I had to travel 1400km with the car each week. I always used Google Maps in an advisory role only - listening to the radio was always a better advisor than Google Maps. Its fastest route algorithm was always reliably wrong. I had the feeling it was always getting stuck in local minima, and it had zero foresight for how traffic works. Just because there is a 10 min traffic jam near to a big city at 5pm when I am still 300 km away does not meant that the jam will still be there in 2-3 hours (7-8pm), and that taking a completely different route that's 50km longer and has a much lower speed limit is going to be faster. No human would make that mistake, but Google maps reliably does. I wish the App would allow you to select the fastest route independently of traffic, and I wish it would give you the reason for the traffic jams (was there an accident? did they close the highway? etc.). What I don't understand is how the Navigation apps of other manufacturers (Daimler, VW, BMW, ...) do not have these problems. While driving, I'd see the navigation device in the car telling me a meaningful route, and Google maps telling me to do something completely absurd. At the end of the day, you are the driver. It's your job to pick up your information sources, and weight them accordingly.
- adrianolek 7y agoThere's a rather entertaining video[1] of a Codewise[2] CEO getting lost in Costa Rica mountains because of Google Maps directions. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDNURhBS998 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDNURhBS998 [2]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/codewise https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/codewise
- ulfw 7y agoI use Google Maps mostly because I really like the look and feel of the maps. But god heavens is it useless outside the US. I can list numerous examples from Asia: roads not existing anymore, new ones not listed, POIs generally so out of date they’d better not even be on there, WRONG bus routes all over Hong Kong with stops and lines not even remotely correct, walking directions don’t take pedestrian walkways and bridges into account (telling you often to walk over half a mile/1km whereas a direct walkway used by thousands of workers a day is only 40m), names of POIs sometimes translated, sometimes not making it hard to find a branch of a line of stores because they all have different type of names now and and and. They look nice though.
- nashahg 7y agoThis has happened to me several times in some remote part of Kenya. Had to stop and ask directions from locals in those instances. https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/118425 https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/118425
- zebnyc 7y agoWhenever I use Waze to try to get San francisco from the east bay / north of golden gate bridge, I am routinely routed through San Jose. Luckily, I use Waze on my wife's phone and it routes me correctly.
- freetime2 7y agoI really wish Google and Apple maps had better support for planning trips in advance. I live in an area where weather conditions in winter could make it potentially deadly to blindly follow GPS instructions, due to road closures or steep grades that Google has no qualms about routing people through. So if I’m heading somewhere new in winter, I always make sure to plan the trip in advance on the desktop version of Google maps - making sure to stick to main roads wherever possible. The problem is that there really isn’t good support for planning and saving a precise route in Google maps (and I assume Apple maps as well). I can sort of hack it by setting a bunch of intermediary destinations along the way to force certain roads, and share that trip with my phone. But that’s clunky and even then Google has a tendency to want to change things on me at the last minute. I also live in an area where there is no support for downloading maps to use offline, so there is a risk of going out of cell service range and losing GPS support. Maybe I am asking too much of free software and should be using paid navigation software. Does anyone have any suggestions? Particularly something that has good map data in Japan?
- kalleboo 7y agoI don't think it has the detailed advance trip planning features you're looking for, but for general navigation in Japan I can't recommend NAVITIME enough. For years after the Kumamoto earthquake, Google Maps would still try to take you down closed roads. Meanwhile NAVITIME will even warn you of road construction where traffic has been constricted to one lane with alternating stoplights. Their data is fantastically detailed. It also has built-in rain/snow precipitation maps, and shows road closures from VICS data in realtime.
- freetime2 7y agoThanks for the suggestion! Looks like NAVITIME makes a whole bunch of different apps of varying purpose and quality. For driving navigation, their "Drive Supporter" app seems to be the best option that I found. (I gave a quick test of their "Car Navi" app and for whatever reason it was off on my current GPS location by 500m - where their other apps didn't have this problem). It is definitely far less aggressive about routing me down narrow back streets than google maps - which is a major gripe I have with both google and apple maps. I tend to prioritize a safe, stress-free drive over saving a minute or two. It also has support for bike paths, which google does not support in my area (although you need to be vigilant as one test tried to route me down an unpaved road which is definitely not accessible by bike). I wouldn't say it's a perfect solution, but I can see the potential benefits over google. I'll give it a try for a bit!
- Angostura 7y agoIt seems like an extra option 'Avoid dirt roads' - an option that TomTom offers - would be useful here
- Biba89 7y agoIt happens every week to me in Serbia.
- sdfjkl 7y agoHeh, you have no idea how lousy Google Maps data really is until you go somewhere away from big cities and countries which Google cares about. In the remote corners of Greece for example, it's completely normal to find nothing in a spot that has a supermarket. It's either in the wrong location, mistranslated, closed 5 years ago or never was there and is just maps spam. Often squinting at the satellite data offers more of a clue where the paths are and sometimes you can glean a shop sign from above. We've had similar experiences in thinly populated areas of Galicia (Spain), Sardinia and Sicily.
- theon144 7y agoLocal map apps would probably fare much better. Can't speak for Greece, but I've had a really analogous experience in Czech Republic - as a city dweller, I've used Google Maps for all sorts of things around Prague without issue. Once you move past the Central Bohemia region, however, the data gets just as spotty and unreliable as you described. Mapy.cz saved my ass and has impressive detail even in quite rural areas (then again, OpenStreetMap is frequently much better than Google Maps as well.)
- gerbilly 7y agoGoogle maps simply does not know what it's talking about. I never rely on it or any GPS. One time in Martinique, it sent me down a road that had been closed for five years. I bought a Michelin printed roadmap after that, it showed that the road in question was closed!
- Digit-Al 7y agoI've had both good and bad experiences of Google map routes. On the bad side, one time when going to a small festival I got routed down this tiny narrow lane that ended up at a dead end leading into a couple of fields. Luckily there was just enough room to turn round (though it was a squeeze) and I was able to find signs to the festival. On the good side, the first time I ever used it to plan a route to my mum's in Wales it took me a a very odd direction, and I was paranoid that I was going the wrong way, but I got to my destination perfectly and a lot more quickly than the old routes I planned myself using a map. I've also once or twice used it to plan a cycle route and it's found little cycle paths and back ways that I never knew existed and were a bit quicker (and a lot safer) than going along the main roads.
- alwaysanagenda 7y agoTed was right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Socie...