Ignore the GPS – That Ocean Is Not a Road | Hacker News Reader

Ignore the GPS – That Ocean Is Not a Road

nytimes.com

65 pointsleephillips61 comments

> If we’re being honest, it’s not that hard to imagine doing something similar ourselves. Most of us use GPS as a crutch while driving through unfamiliar terrain, tuning out and letting that soothing voice do the dirty work of navigating.

It is very difficult for me to imagine driving 250 miles out of the way (especially when I'm tired and really want to get where I'm going); or driving into the ocean; or driving off a bridge because I've ignored all the road closed signs. I don't even shut my brain off to this degree when another human is helping navigate.

The article is saying our cognitive maps are deteriorating because navigation software provides the information instantly at hand. For some people that may be true. I've noticed this effect in other aspects of my life, though not with navigation. But even if true, that does not explain people ignoring all other indicators that something is not correct.

This sounds like a remix of one of the many "internet is making us dumb" stories. If anything the existence of GPS, satellite, constantly updated maps, and now detailed 3D city maps makes our "cognitive maps" (whatever that means) far better now than in the past where our navigation was done from printed Rand McNally folding map.

The reality is there are a lot of impaired drivers on the road. May be they have been drinking, have early onset dementia, or just a mixture of prescription medications with undocumented side effects. A lot have spent half the time sending text messages on their phones. Whatever the circumstance, some of the tools we have now let them survive longer or at least pretend they know what they are doing.

You only listed impairments with no excuse that are socially unacceptable but done all the time by everyone and statistically usually ends well almost every time anyway. There's another class of impairment that make no interesting clickbait and no social signalling... Kid sick in the back seat or just naughty, unexpected construction reroute, dark, bad weather, digestive impairment or other sudden onset illness setting in, the purpose of the trip might be highly distracting (funeral, sick relative in hospital), crazy unanticipated traffic jams, maybe the car is mechanically starting to act up.

Those stories make terrible clickbait unless there's a GPS involved, then the GPS can take 100% of the blame as if there was nothing else involved, and it makes itself insta-clickbait.

And possibly the biggest one of all, just being tired. Most people don't get enough rest these days, and that can be just as bad as being drunk, in terms of what it does to your focus and coordination.

Do you really doubt that if you use a GPS to navigate over an unfamiliar route and were then asked to repeat the journey the following day, you'd do significantly worse than if you'd had to plan your original route by hand?

A cognitive map is an internal mental map of how some region of space is connected. Using landmarks and signs to follow a route from a map naturally builds mental connections between your observations of the world and the corresponding points on the map, in a way that following spoken directions does not.

I recently moved across the country, to a city I'd never been in before.

I tend to use the GPS on my phone the first couple of times I need to go to some particular place. After that, the experience of having driven the route a couple times is good enough that I can find my way.

I do. Seeing the moving map while I drive helps cement everything together for me. I can see if you just blindly obey the machine and pay no attention to the context that it would hurt, but nothing says you have to do it that way.

But then, I'm one of those people who generally only needs to see a route once in order to know it. When I visit people in other cities, after a few days I'm often showing them how to get to places rather than vice versa.

I absolutely think that following the GPS provides a worse mental map of the area/route than looking at an old fashioned paper map.

Here in Melbourne we have (shortly: had) the Melways. A4 size traditional map-book, two pages covers a good couple of suburbs. Let's call it a 5km-wide area.

When you look at this map, you see the relationships of suburbs. Balaclava is just to the east of St Kilda, which flows to the south to Elwood, etc. You see the major arterial roads and where they lead. You build a proper, high-level mental model of where you are.

Contrast this to the GPS. "Turn left in 100m" tells you nothing of your locale. It gives you no context. You see a sign that says "Elwood" and you're heading south because the beach is to your right and you know you want to be in St Kilda but this isn't useful to you: your brain doesn't instinctively think, hmm, that just feels wrong.

GPS is amazing until it doesn't work, and then you are truly lost.

If I know a trip should take about two hours, and after three hours I'm not there, I know something went wrong. That's a good time to stop and reassess the situation.

Shouldn't you check the route preview before driving to see how long the GPS thinks the trip will take?

That is essentially what I meant, more or less. To your point a little bit of critical thinking goes a long way as well. If I've programmed a route from Chicago to Milwaukee (let's call it 100 miles) and the GPS tells me it will take 9 hours, that should be a clue something isn't right. Either I've got the wrong route or traffic is truly something horrendous.

I know that my own navigational skills have atrophied - I used to be able to glance at a map in an unknown area and that'd be all I'd need to get to X. I can't do that anymore these days. I wouldn't do the 250-mile excursion (I'm nowhere near that bad), but the bit that puzzles me is the stories of the people who drive into obstacles - GPS is a navigator, it doesn't change the nature of driving itself. You wouldn't drive through a red light because that's where your GPS was directing you, so why would you drive into an obstacle?

TL;DR: "Obeying orders" is a powerful pattern; combined with "computer is always right", it can be downright deadly.

An anecdote: I've been driving in this one particular city for ages, I know the streets and their properties - yet while I was busy with traffic (rain and night and pedestrians, oh my), it only took a "turn left NOW" command to send me wrong way into a one-way street (instead of the correct one, a block down). I knew that specific street was one way, but not focusing on navigation at that moment, I have blindly obeyed, as it looked somewhat reasonable; only after turning did I realize what I have done (fortunately, nothing else came of that incident). Note that I do not have blind trust in algorithms - quite the contrary (turned out the navigation's data was wrong), yet I have outsourced a part of my cognitive load onto the device.

I'm not blaming the device: the faulty action was all mine (that's what you get for a talking toaster ordering you around). What I got was some insight: I no longer wonder why someone with more trust in their computing devices could do something so "blindingly stupid." This is probably the one area in UX that's hard to fix: the assumption that Friend Computer Is Always Right.

The way I've often viewed it is that (to exaggerate a bit), you have to mental bandwidth to either figure out your own route or to carefully listen to and follow instructions (whether from a GPS or a person). It can be hard to listen to instructions and evaluate in each case whether you should follow them or not.

More commonly, driving to a restaurant named X in neighborhood B rather than the restaurant X in neighborhood A, which I have done before.

This reminds me of a trip I was on a couple of years ago. I was traveling from Italy to France, and wanted to make a visit to a friend in Switzerland on the way. I never drove that route before, so I just typed the friend's address into the GPS and followed every turn. It made me go on a really curvy and steep road up the Alps, than equally curvy and steep down. The road was wet from the melting ice/snow (it was a summer trip) and at one point I went through a foggy area which looked like I was driving through the clouds.

It was a pretty interesting experience, but I kept thinking that it was strange that there were basically no other cars in either direction. When I got to the bottom I saw why: this road was merging with a tunnel which goes directly underneath the path I took, saving you a couple of hours of driving. Live and learn.

So the GPS took you into a lonesome journey of introspection, man and machine conquering a demanding road through the beautiful scenery of the summer Alps... instead of directing you to through a boring, overcrowded tunnel? Seems pretty good to me!

Everyone laughs at these mistakes, including me. Mine happened while holidaying in the Lake District, we were planning to hike to Scafell Pike (highest point in England), from Seathwaite. So we rolled out of our tent at 5am, got in the car, punched Seathwaite into the sat nav, and drove. We passed ominous warning signs. We thought that sounded reasonable for the highest point in England so we ploughed on.

We did get out the car at Seathwaite an hour or more later, feeling slightly puzzled as we had recollections it was about 30 minutes away from the campground. We put it down to google underestimating the time taken to go on the slightly scary steep, single track roads.

After stretching our legs, we consulted our actual map + walking instructions and couldn't get anything to match up. We flagged down a local and they pointed out that there's another Seathwaite about ten miles away as the crow flies and that was probably the one we wanted. The catch was that three mountains lay between us. I've rarely felt so embarrassed. The drive over the Wrynose and Hard Knott pass was very picturesque though.

While driving in Bavaria my wife was programming the GPS. Since she new nothing of umlauts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut) we ended up going to a tiny farming community rather than a town near Schloß Neuschwanstein. Luckily, a suitable castle also constructed by King Ludwig can be found in nearly every part of Bavaria, a few minutes searching turned one up, and it turned into an unexpectedly wonderful day.

GPS errors can bring good experiences as well.

Honestly, it wouldn't hurt for the software to have some warnings and confirmations for trips that exceed 3 hours.

I've been burned by this myself since I still used an old Garmin far past its expiry date - trying to avoid a border toll while I was visiting Buffalo, it tried to send me the complete wrong direction and I only stopped when I noticed the arrival time said 9am and not 9pm... I was unfamiliar with the area so it would be easy to not realize my mistake, I only checked the device when it became obvious when I'd been on the road too long for what was supposed to be a shortish drive.

Similarly, in New Brunswick it tried to have me shortcut through an increasingly-rugged wasteland of logging roads. It took me an hour of backtracking to extricate myself from that. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

I use Google Maps now.

I guess a GPS navigator is not an excuse for not having a map or not knowing how to read one, at least on longer out of town trips. I've been burned a number of times when a gps navigator tried to take a 'shorter route' through logging roads and mountain passes that you could cross only on foot.

I trusted Google Maps untill few weeks ago it sent us down a road that became undriveable and dangerous -- costing us about two hrs. Although, this did happen in Martinique, for the most part I've had good experiencea with Google Maps in US.

In the Western US, there are a lot of roads that range between unpaved but well-graded and generally fine for passenger car use to serious high-clearance 4WD in good weather only. In my experience, Google Maps doesn't routinely send you down seriously questionable roads. But, if you drive around those areas, it behooves you to really understand the range of roads out there and be properly cautious rather than blindly depending on GPS--or, for that matter, a map.

The biggest problem is really that a lot of people come from areas where road is 99% equivalent to passable by passenger car under most to all weather conditions and seasons. That's just not the case in many places, e.g. Death Valley.

Rural roads in the United States are something to be especially wary of when using OpenStreetMap derived maps. They are often un-updated TIGER data from 2008, prior to Census doing a big push on accuracy. There are issues with roads being poorly located (or not existing), but there are also issues with little or no differentiation between roads, so a nice new asphalt highway might be classed the same as a barely passable dirt road.

One reasonable strategy would be to stick to things that are labeled as state or US highways.

(with enough scale, it should be possible to use traffic data to figure out which roads should be prioritized, but programs like OSMAnd are not yet doing that)

>with enough scale, it should be possible to use traffic data to figure out which roads should be prioritized

It wouldn't be perfect but, yeah, I'd expect to see some correlation between traffic and road condition--at least for a given area.

There's just a lot of nuance in road condition though. People who take their Jeeps off the beaten track every weekend in national forests and parks have a pretty different set of standards from an urbanite who is renting a car with a doughnut spare and no other special gear.

The goal with OSM is certainly to sensibly classify roads and even to collect information like the surface type and width.

I guess with that part of the comment I was partly wondering if other data providers have done similar things, taking some vaguely useful source data and trying to enhance it using automated methods, leading to the poor navigation talked about in various threads here.

One of my favorite examples of this is using Google Maps to find your way from Monument Valley to Natural Bridges or vice versa -- sends you right up/down the Moki Dugway, which despite being part of a state highway is not a road for everyone.

Google maps isn't free from these problems. This past autumn it routed a lot of people down an impassable sandy desert road that serves a state prison. So many people were thus diverted that there was a line of stuck cars in the middle of nowhere.

Every navigation device I've used will show the estimated drive time, distance, and a map. I always do a quick sanity check on these before I start following the directions. Do other people not do this?

On many GPS models, including my own crusty Garmin, this requires an additional tap and a longish wait while it renders the map as an illegible squiggle. So I rarely do this unless I want to confirm that I'm going via a specific route, and even then it's only useful if I know the route options beforehand and can tell them apart.

As an aside, the Garmin routing is terrible: it (for example) frequently "optimizes" for distance by doing endless zigzags on small roads instead of a single turn on big roads, even when the settings tell it to take the "best" or the "fastest" route. Of course this is to some degree unavoidable when all the brains it has is a tiny on-board CPU; but I've already long since resolved that my next car will have Android Auto, so the cloud can do the work.

>As an aside, the Garmin routing is terrible: it (for example) frequently "optimizes" for distance by doing endless zigzags on small roads instead of a single turn on big roads

Google sometimes does this as well. I joke that it seems as if Google Maps sometimes just wants to take a drive in the country. Not that I always mind but, especially if the weather isn't great, I'd probably prefer the simpler route even if it theoretically takes a minute more.

Some say arrival time, not drive time. Arrival time misleading if it's sending you on. A 26-hour journey, and you have to choose to view the full route, often through a tedious UI.

IMHO, this is a place where blaming the user is inappropriate. GPS trips exceeding 3 hours are rare enough that it would be perfectly reasonable for it to make you click through a few extra bits of information in those cases.

I can buy the case for improving the systems, but not blaming the users? These things don't claim to be more than they are: they are driving aids, not brain substitutes. If it's hard to figure out if they're giving you appropriate advice, then you do it anyway, or don't use them.

If manufacturers were making grandiose claims then yeah, blame them. But if anything, the claims are overly conservative because they're afraid of liability.

I have anecdata here. A single lane, paved but rough road, signed 'no entry for deliveries' regularly has delivery vehicles coming up it because their GPS navigator told them to.

The sign is large. The track is almost half a mile long and has nowhere to turn around at the end.

It is very difficult to get the navigation providers to remove this private access from the maps. Even if they do, there are many people who will never update their satnav software.

This lack of updating may become an increasing problem as roads change and hardware ages, but directions remain the same.

The only GPS mishap I've ever had was when Google maps got me in an infinite loop.

I was driving into San Francisco from the East bay, and when I got over the bay bridge, Google had me get off the freeway, turn a few times, and I ended up right back on the freeway, going back over the bridge. I realized right away what was happening after I got back on the freeway, but there were no more exits, so I had to drive to treasure island, and turn around.

That wasn't so bad, but once I crossed the bridge again, I kept following the GPS and ended up right back on the bridge.

Google Maps would try to get me to do this every time I drove over the bridge for a couple of weeks, but I never fell for it again.

This was around the time that they were building the new east bridge, so I wondered if it had anything to do with that but I can't imagine how it would.

I'm sure at least a portion of those construction workers on the bridge had Android phones that Google collected maps data from.

Ha, then someone just needs a flock of location enabled smartphones pushing faked traffic patterns back to Google and hilarity ensues... :)

Coming off the bridge out of Galveston, Google Maps has put me in an infinite loop before. No construction to blame either.

Late last year a friend of mine was involved in a car accident.

The other driver was following the Google Maps directions on their phone which told them to go down a one way street, it just happened to be the wrong direction. Luckily no one was hurt.

People really need to pay attention when they drive and read the road signs. Just because the GPS says to go down a street, doesn't mean you are allowed to go down it the wrong way.

Yup, source data is one of the issues here: I had Waze send me up one-way streets more than once. (Okay...there's a community map editor, let's fire that up and fix this. "You can't edit a road, you need Magic Editor Points." Oookay, how do I get Magic Editor Points? "You get points by making edits..." and you need points to do that.

Well take that editor and shove it, I'm in no mood for a Catch-22.)

Reminds me of a time when I was using GPS to get around Vancouver Island.

Rather than taking me on the real highway I got directed to a "highway" that was a narrow mountain logging road. I did realize exactly what was going on and decided to keep going in my Subaru Outback for the sake of the adventure. Eventually did get through. Then there was this time in Utah where my GPS decided that following the powerlines on what was sometimes not even a road was better than going around. One of the locals hearing the story later joked you should never use a GPS in Utah. In both cases I knew the GPS was crazy but as long as I could safely continue I went on for the sake of the adventure... If things got too hairy I'd simply turn around...

I have a good counter-example. I was traveling to Shenzhen and I had a faxed address and directions for the hotel. It was in Chinese, which I can't read. About an hour into what should have been a 20 minute trip, it occurred to me I was being taken somewhere entirely different. I turned on data roaming, figuring that could not be more expensive than ending up two hours away from my hotel at 3am. A search in English turned up local results with labels in Chinese. The driver had to drop me at the taxi garage to wait for a driver going in the right direction, so I got to see what a Chinese taxi company looks like at 2am, but was spared a lengthier adventure.

Article freely conflates GPS with software navigation. Over of these things works perfectly while the other has technical and usability quirks still not solved.

There's no need to be pedantic about that. GPS navigation Hardware and software branded itself as "GPS" for a long time, you can't blame the public and the media for conflating them now.

The real mystery is, why he even bothered to take a rental car from keflavik to his hotel in reykjavik, instead of just taking the shuttle.

So smart. Maybe he planned a trip for the next day?

I wonder if it was trip to Siglufjörður, and he got there a day early.

I was irritated by this, but I just accepted that "GPS" is what people call their devices and that's the name for the whole device.

How many people got lost and died or whatever before GPS navigation?

How many people have been lost in dangerous situation but were able to get to safety due to GPS navigation?

How many people are balls stupid and will win a Darwin Award regardless of what technology the use or don't.

Exactly. There were and always will be stupid people, it's not technologies to blame. If not blindly following GPS to death, they would choke on spoon or smth anyway. I'm actually glad to see that natural selection works even in the digital age.

Lots of People rely on GPS navigation without checking. This tells us how well it works and nothing else.

As an OSM-editor I know the map has many errors. (Not in my neighborhood mind you.) So when I strapped a Garmin loaded with OSM to my bicycle I knew what to expect. Sometimes I let it navigate my destination even when I know the route I want to take. Then I watch the device give me suggestions to know whether the map works. Found quite a few details that break navigation in OSM. Used that way you get immune to the urge to follow everything the device tells you. I have yet to attempt cycling down stairs that were recorded as path.

One common occurrence is the device insisting on you to turn around; its estimates getting longer and longer. A few later villages later in your journey you cross the nodes where the road was not correctly connected in OSM and the device is suddenly happy again.

When I'm somewhere I don't know, and OSM is reliable in that area, I find navigation very comfortable to use and it's saved me a lot of brain cycles.

Back in the summer I found an oddity on the map what I wanted to explore for the sake of it. It was on the way back from a customer's house and I had the rest of the afternoon off, so it was great timing.

I navigated the waypoints and tracks as the map directed but one of the track's surfaces was degenerating beyond practical travel. I didn't mind a bit of mud, but didn't feel like drowning :-)

After another bend, it was clear the mud wasn't getting better. I turned round and headed back home, as the alternate routes weren't really practical. This story ends with not a lot happening.

I find stories such as the headline, and others in the comments, are very difficult to relate to. I suppose this is because I take in information I see in real-time and allow myself to make decisions on the fly. I'm sure there's a part of the brain involved which must be inhibited in some way that allows blind following of instruction, be it made by a device or other way.

An even more troubling aspect is the increasing lack of ability for our pilots to fly by hand instead of relying on the autopilot. A large number of accidents today, like the Asiana 214 that went into the SFO airport sea wall, could easily be avoided if either the PIC or the FO pay attention to what's happening around them instead of having their eyes glued to the colorful shiny dials. Take Asiana 214 - the PIC had pulled engine power to idle, flew far too low on his approach to runway 28L, expected automation to pick up slack, didn't bother to visually check if things were all right, and crashed into the sea wall.

I remember in Lebanon getting on the wrong bus with a slightly similar name and ended up somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.

Dam GPS, these days I would have realised sooner and not had that adventure.

Self Driving cars rely on exactly this same data. (Read all the stories from other HN members in this thread on bad data, it's not always the user's fault.)

Despite all the hype I don't expect general purpose self driving cars ever. At best we'll have some interstate express lanes exclusively designed for self driving cars, and that's about it.

"Ever" is a long time. Though I agree insofar as it's probably further out than a lot of people are assuming.

But, yes, it will be a long time before maps are sufficiently good across wide areas of the rural US (much less the world as a whole) to enable self-driving. The situation when you start talking about unpaved roads becomes even more problematic.

Isn't it just a matter of the car paying attention to the road and if it doesn't match up to the map's version, picking an alternate route?

Autonomous vehicles today are highly dependent on having accurate high-resolution road maps. Without them, you don't have a self-driving car. And, when you talk about unpaved rural roads, there often aren't any alternative routes.

Presumably if/when we get such vehicles, they'll only be approved to drive some subset of roads and, if they encounter an unknown condition, they'll have to stop and have a human driver take over in some manner.

Why advertise yourself as dumbass with zero common sense?

Well look what the cat brought in :D

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xta1/t31.0...

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