Death by GPS

This is clearly traceable to TIGER, the US Census data that most map providers use as the bedrock of their map data in the rural US, yet was never meant for automotive navigation.

TIGER classes pretty much any rural "road" uniformly - class A41, if you're interested. That might be a paved two-lane road, it might be a forest track. Just as often, it's a drainage ditch or a non-existent path or other such nonsense. It's wholly unreliable.

You can see this in OpenStreetMap easily. Navigate to the backwoods and look at the road types. It's predominantly highway=residential, the road type that A41 was mapped to in the TIGER import. highway=residential is usually meant for city streets and suburban residential roads. Not this.

So: help! I've genuinely spent weeks on this but it's a massive job. Paved road? Reclassify it as highway=tertiary (wider with centreline) or highway=unclassified (narrower, no centreline). Gravel or dirt graded road? highway=unclassified, surface=gravel (or =dirt). Rough, not recommended for most cars? highway=track. Genuinely a paved residential road? Keep the highway tag as it is, but delete the tiger:reviewed=no tag. Nothing there at all? Just delete it.

(My particular interest in this is bicycle routing. Bike routing usually prefers the smallest paved roads in the grid. It breaks if those "paved roads" are impassable desert tracks in reality. I take a very conservative view for my site, http://cycle.travel/map, precisely because I'm anxious about situations such as that described in the Ars article.)

I travel by tiny backroads whenever possible - often dirt, frequently by motorcycle, and sometimes in third world countries. I love the GPS because it allows me to have a reasonable expectation that these crazy little roads will go through.

I've found one "master" secret to not getting lost: Get rid of all that 3D garbage and put the map in overhead view, north up. It takes a tiny bit of practice getting used to the dynamic meaning of Left and Right but you build up a geospatial awareness and can usually tell when the GPS is getting stupid.

I spent several weeks exploring this very area--Jarbidge, NV--last summer in my old Land Rover. It's no joke. There are many Forest Service "roads" that are completely impassible, even by a very capable 4WD vehicle such as the one I drive. I spent over a year planning routes before I took my trip. I had plotted out a route from Jarbdige to Silver City, ID that's completely on dirt and--incidentally--probably crossed some of the same roads this couple took. I was traveling with other trucks and we ended up driving through ankle-deep mud and thick tamarisk trees before giving up. What looks like a passable route on USGS topos and Google Earth doesn't always pan out.

You can see some photos from the trip here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/albums/721576543876...

I also did a detailed write-up with photos:

http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/146545-The-Owy...

I was following a GPS at night just across the border in Mexico near Laredo. After driving for 5 minutes or so down a highway, I stopped because it seemed oddly dark and quiet. Checked the GPS for another route, and when I pulled a U-turn to head back, my headlights shown over the end of the road 20 feet ahead of where I'd stopped. The pavement just ended with a 15ft drop to a creek gully. I would have driven straight off it at 60 mph if I hadn't stopped.

I had one of these experiences when I was driving from Hungary to Austria. I was just blindly following the GPS, which started taking me down some very small roads with lots of turns. Since I had no idea where I was going I didn't question it.

I eventually stumbled upon a sign, in German, that was big and red, and I knew I was on the border between Hungary and Austria. I wasn't sure what the sign said, and at the time I didn't realize the two countries had an open border. I looked around for police like cars, and then quickly crossed the border, eventually reaching my destination just inside Austria.

As it turns out the sign just said "no vehicles over two metric tons", and that somehow I had gotten of the highway which had a very nice border crossing.

But a few years earlier and that mistake would have gotten me arrested!

Does anyone think this problem will get any better if/when we allow the GPS to actually drive the car?

I'm waiting for the day that someone tells their iCar to "Drive me Home" and they wake up stranded 7,000 feet up "Mt. Home". It's not the GPS that is the problem. GPS does exactly what it was designed to do. The problem isn't even in the mapping software. The problem is that the human is too ready to give up decision-making to a machine. That should inform many autodrive enthusiasts who think humans cannot be trusted with their own navigation.

I'm reminded of a principle from aviation, "always fly the plane". Student pilots are taught to never allow their attention to drift from the basics of flight, even if they're dealing with mechanical failure or confusing instrument readings. The first priority is always to maintain situational awareness. A large subset of aviation disasters could have been prevented if the pilot had simply looked out of the window.

Actually, I ran into a situation you all might like on this topic. I was visiting a friend staying with someone in a shady area somewhat between OK areas and The Hood. Easy route to get there on a major highway that keeps you away from harm. Now, I have to see another friend in Middle America (aka "the burbs") which can be reached same way with one exit leading to Interstate. Just use the GPS to find last, odd roads on the route. Results surprised me.

Route 1: Turn left here, right here, right here, left here, highway here, odd roads here. 30 minutes.

Route 2: Get back on highway, drive a while, Interstate, drive a while, odd roads. 33 minutes.

Thing is, I recognized each street in route 1: The Hood(s) with about 300 cops a shift who can't keep up with the amount of stuff that goes down. The other was a straight, safe shot. I thought, "Is Google really trying to send me through all the worst areas of my city... areas where you have to stop right next to potential carjackers and killers... just to save three minutes?"

Now I know why people coming through think my city is just a shithole. It's a mix of great, good, OK, bad, and ugly but Google keeps sending people through The Hood. No wonder they think it's nothing but poverty and crime. So, then I got the idea for a movie or TV show where there's a serial killer that, SAW-style, makes people kill themselves. By Google Maps instructions they follow blindly into the worst areas. You might see it on TV but you heard it here first.

Yeah, don't trust the GPS's until they know the difference between an armed robbery and an Interstate. At the least, they need to realize we won't take that kind of risk unless we're talking about saving 30min to hours, the interview is too important for Interstate traffic, or she was one bad-ass lady. Not over three minutes, though. ;)

This is a very unfortunate story When I first moved out west I looked up directions with the Alltrails app, presumably based on some sort of map app, maybe google maps, to a trailhead in Idaho that should have been about an hour off the interstate. We drove until we reached a stream crossing that would have been impossible to cross in the car we had. However, we would not have continued up to the stream if the road narrowed to such a point that we were unable to turn the car around, also, it was at worst a days walk to the nearest town. We continued on foot following the directions for a bit, realizing the road was clearly an ATV trail and didn't appear to actually lead to the trailhead which looked to be quite a distance across a valley and a few mountains. We eventually headed back to the car (the scenery was still beautiful so nothing was really lost). We turned back and then re-read the correct directions from the forest service and tried to follow them to the real trailhead, eventually, asking for help from a super-fit cyclist climbing the mountain road alongside our little car. We finally arrived at the road to the trailhead only to find it covered in snow, unsurprisingly, as it was only early June and we were at 6000ft. The first moral of the story was GPS directions to trailheads are often incorrect and you should try and follow the real directions to the trailhead. The second is to know what conditions to expect during your travels.

It's not only blindly following GPS that can lead you to problems. Sometimes road signs can be inaccurate or misleading too.

I was driving on a reasonably remote highway in Victoria Australia. My car was running low on petrol. As I approached an exit there was a sign that said last service for 90km or something like this. I did some mental maths and decided I could make it another 90km so pushed on. The fuel warning light came on about half way through the 90km. When I reached the exit the pump was out of order and station closed (tiny rural station). Now I was forced either to turn back or push on to next station. I decided to push on and ended up running out of petrol I had to call roadside assistance. If I hadn't seen the sign saying the next service was 90 km away I would have pulled in then and there.

Things that GPS/Waze still don't do a good job of handling:

1. Toll roads - You can either choose to avoid, or choose to take. But I want to avoid toll roads when it will cost me > $x / saved hour. Or how about some optimization between fuel use and the value of my time? Paying $2 to save 30 minutes makes sense, buy not $15 to save 2 minutes. Where's the in-between setting/dial?

2. High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes. The highway may make a lot of sense with 2 people, but not while being a solo driver.

3. Traffic levels and when to wake up. I wish Waze could integrate with my alarm clock to wake me up extra early when major roads are closed, and I'd be majorly late for work without giving me an extra margin.

4. I'm not a trucker, nor an SUV driver, but something to account for high-height vehicles could be useful for many.

Within Arches National Park, my GPS told me to turn left to get back on the main stretch of road towards vegas (we were in a hurry and the park seemed like a good idea at the time). It sent us on a route meant for 4x4 offroading.. in my 4 cylinder lancer. By the time we figured that out, it seemed quicker to just keep going - the GPS agreed. Well, two hours and a havoc'd suspension system later, we finally got back on the main road. Damn you, technology.

These days I have a dry erase board for directions in lieu of a gps and phone. I only need to look at it every now and then, and as long as my notes are correct, it's just about as easy to get there. If I get lost, pulling over and asking someone isn't that difficult to do, either. Not sure I'll go back. :)

Okay, I'll be the one to say it - how does this bode for the future of autonomous cars? If a man drives off a cliff because he was following a GPS and not paying attention then that's not great, granted - but if your car drives you off a cliff whilst you're reading in the backseat that's another matter :)

There was an increase in boats hitting buoys when GPS became common, out on the water there really is very little traffic so setting an autopilot is often practical, but if you set a waypoint exactly on the coordinates of a buoy and forget to keep a close watch or proximity alarm, it tracks right into a big iron marker.

I still remember vividly the death of James Kim, the CNET reporter who died because GPS lead him and his family onto a small mountain road that shouldn't have been opened in the first place. I didn't know him personally, but he was a close friend of a friend, and as the events were unfolding, daily I could see the worry and pain in my friend's face, until he was found dead (but his family was miraculously found alive). This happened about 10 years ago in the mountains in Oregon, notoriously treacherous during the winter.

Surprisingly, my neighbor revently described to me how she almost died in the same area by following GPS, just last winter, almost 9 years later. They blindly went up a mountain road in the snow as they were trying to drive to Portland from the Bay Area, and they went to the point where they could barely turn their car around. Had they attempted to stop later, they would have gotten stuck and it would have turned into a similar story.

Unfortunately, GPS needs a setting labelled "follow the safest, biggest roads".

I was using Google Maps to take a shortcut through Kathmandu on foot. Just as I commented on the amazing accuracy of the map, I found myself approaching a dead end that the map showed continued onwards.

I turned around and several small dogs were in the road behind me. No big deal I thought, I walked past them as they barked at the intruder.

I continued in the most promising direction, which turned out to also be a dead end. Behind me the small dogs had been joined by an enormous fierce dog so angry his hair was standing on end. And the only path out was past him.

I stayed calm with my eyes on the exit, walking wide of dogs who were drooling and livid.

Better lucky than smart, I guess. I've never been cavalier about following Google maps since.

I had a fun experience in the Dominican Republic once: There was no official coverage of the island at that time, but I was able to get a map for my Garmin from some shady Russian website. The roads were accurate for the most part, but they were lacking all of the metadata like highway size, speed, direction, etc. We used it to drive from our resort to another town down the coast, and lacking all of that data, the Garmin just routed us through the shortest path, which turned out to be a country road out in the hills that eventually disappeared. Luckily I was able to ask some bemused farmers how to get to the right road - basically drive 20 miles back and get on the highway.

A very harrowing story.

This seems to be an extension of what my family called "the Jeep principle". A jeep, and now a GPS, enables you to get stuck further from help.

Recently I have been noticing how Uber/Lyft drivers in NYC are "gps sheep". The lack of common sense is astounding to me. They are very often only listening to their gps and nothing else.

One time, a driver chose to circle around after two blocks instead of turning directly right at an intersection, because Waze said it had a lot of traffic and therefore chose that route. If he had bothered to turn his head right, he'd see that the road was empty.

I wonder how this happens, though. Normally, finding a route for cars will try to follow increasingly larger roads. This has practical reasons to avoid scenarios outlined in the article and also performance reasons to avoid searching the complete graph of roads.

Getting a route that follows many small roads usually only happens if you tell the GPS to find the shortest route (and really the shortest one), or by using its bicycle or pedestrian routing.

It also requires the user to ignore any signs along the way, putting way more trust in a bunch of males that's hard to keep updated properly than is healthy. (For topographical maps in Germany (I guess road maps have similar problems) it is sometimes normal for certain regions not to receive an update in a decade or two, thus sometimes showing very outdated features. OSM these days is luckily either very up to date or simply very sparse, depending on the region and how many people with local knowledge are contributing.)

The younger generation is increasingly reliant on gadgets too for many things. When I was 11 my friends and I would take the subway to Manhattan from Brooklyn to go to Central Park, walking and the museums. We always agreed on a meeting spot at a set time, since this was 1975. Payphones were the only option.

I've been to the mall with my friends and their children, and there is no pre-planning, since they rely on the phones to meetup. However, when the battery dies, they're lost, or they rely on a friend's phone or charging station being available. There's an implicit reliance on redundancy, and blind faith somebody has a gadget.

I always taught my children to pre-plan. I have taken them around the world at young ages, and I think they have become better planners and thinkers when they are taught 'the old ways':)

I have traveled a lot, and I have lived in other countries, some remote places, and I have been lulled by technology too. Fortunately, not life-threatening situations, but I can easily see it happening.

A few days ago while driving in East Java, we followed the GPS into a sugar cane field. The road narrowed, was muddy, and started to diminish to almost just field. The road was on the GPS, and valid, but the van almost got stuck in the mud from the day's rain. This has happened to me about 2 to 3 times in 7 years, because smaller and smaller roads have made their way to the maps as mapping increases, and the GPS uses a traffic/length of route algorithm that sometimes has you turning off and back on to main roads to make time. I never would have followed that last turn-off several years ago.

I usually set the GPS to 'main roads and highways', but in some less-developed places this will put you at the mercy of weather, the vehicle's capabilities, and hoping that the routes have not changed since they were mapped. I also agree with other posters here in leaving it in overhead view with North as up. On a highway, no, but on twisty roads, yes. It is the only way you maintain orientation and a sense of the actual location you are in.

The more mundane case of reliance on GPSes is to not know the route you're taking and blindly following the GPS. Then if (for example) there's two exits close together it leads to distracted drivers, focused mostly on reading the GPS device trying to figure out which exit the GPS is telling them to exit to -- which can lead to rapid, panicked lane changes.

Source: was hit a few weeks ago by a car that did a sudden lane change with no signal right before an exit by a guy who was trying to follow his GPS...

Makes me think that this article I wrote on my blog several years ago is more pertinent than ever:

http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2010/08/boycott-gps/

Seriously, folks. Turn off the GPS, and start observing the world around you. And if you really do need route navigation, do it the old-fashioned way: study a map! (Printed or online, doesn't matter).

This has nothing to do with GPS imho. Plenty of people died in the past by following an out of date map, or incorrect directions. The most common theme in situations like this is not realizing when you are crossing over from an inconvenience to a life threating situation. Driving somewhere without thinking "what happens if I break down out here? Does anyone know where I am?" Then taking additional risks without understanding what the stakes are.

"eventually to a confusing three-way crossroads. They chose the one that seemed to point in the direction they wanted to go. And here their troubles began."

This line seems to suggest that the GPS wasn't ultimately at fault?

My GPS has options for avoiding tolls and the like, but I've not seen one giving the ability to define the capability of the car. That said, there is huge variability in quality of unpaved roads, especially when impacted by weather.

Since there are no citations which kind of sucks (or did I miss them somehow?)...the 2006 base study mentioned in the article is called: "Computer-assisted navigation and the acquisition of route and survey knowledge" by Münzer, Zimmer, Schwalm, Baus and Aslan

No one sets out to spend two months drinking out of mud puddles and getting your husband killed. I get that, I won't pile on with "morons, don't rely on your GPS", because that doesn't help anything but my own sense of superiority. That said, I sometimes wonder if there shouldn't be a little one-pager that comes with your GPS. No one will read it, of course. I'm not exactly sure what it would say, either. But a few points to consider...

Observe your surroundings. If you begin to start to feel the slightest discomfort with the route you're on, consider turning back. Please reference "sunk cost fallacy". The time you lose backtracking is nothing in comparison to the time lost if you're dead. Or to be less dramatic, it might take a day for a tow truck to get to you, if they can get to you at all.

And always be prepared to turn back. Hell, I do it all the time; did it just this weekend, in fact. Wanted to go over Stampede Pass in the camper van with the dogs, camp, do some hiking, see the ghost town of Lester. Big plans! Warm spring, mid-May, should be good. Nope, turned back by snow. Might have been able to make it, but on those tires? Meh, go camp somewhere else, no fun to be had digging your van out of the snow ten feet at a time. More so on the bike: point A to point B on forest roads, map says it should go all the way through. Sometimes I'm turned back by gated roads. Sometimes, like the stories in this articles, the road turns to two dirt tracks separated by tall grass, to trail, to what once was a narrow trail and is now overgrown with saplings. And yet I still catch myself thinking, "park the bike, walk ahead a few hundred feet, see if it gets any better". Despite being somewhere no tow truck will come, with a 600lb. bike (heavy, for the uninitiated) ridden by a scrawny marathon runner who's going to have a shitload of fun picking said bike up when he drops it. Don't be a dumbass like me; turn around.

If you are well and truly lost, stay where you are. I'm not talking the "oh, we missed our turn" kind of lost. I'm talking, "without backtracking, I have no real idea where I am in relation to a major road or decent-sized town...or even a house" lost. If you find yourself hoping the road gets better, hoping this road will take you where you want to go, and hoping it will just all work out if you keep going, STOP. Maybe not until Search and Rescue finds you, but at least stop for an hour and get your bearings. Good bearings, so that you can point at a map (if you had one) and say with 90% confidence, "that's where we're at". Figure out your plan, 'cuz the current one ain't working. And do not leave your vehicle. Time and again I read these stories of "GPS took them down a snow-covered forest road, and they got stuck" that end with someone dying because they walked to get help. You're obviously already lost, you're not going to unlost by walking around ill-equipped.

Call in to work, call the friends you're supposed to meet, call off that client meeting, because you're going to be late or not make it at all. Seriously, just give up those thoughts right now. The time for "making up time" is over. You fucked up, and now you're late. Continuing on is not going to undo that fact. For one, you have insufficient information to conclude that you stand any chance of arriving on time. You don't even know where you are, how do you know how long it will take to arrive? So go ahead and backtrack, because you're plans are shot. Or go on over that mountain pass in mid-Novemember, the GPS says there's a road, and you might still make it. Just kidding, no you won't. You'll get stuck, try to walk to get help, and freeze to death on the way.

That's what my pamphlet might look like anyway. I often wonder how folks get themselves in these situations, and the best theory I have is that we have enough everyday convenience that we forget the parts of the U. S and Canada (let alone the world) that are still very remote and very dangerous for the unprepared. Many of us live where there's always a gas station, always a cell signal, always some landmark to give us guidance as to where we are. Road signs to tell us where to go, guardrails to keep us falling off a cliff. As the folks in this article found out, the western U. S. is a place where it is very easy to get yourself into trouble if you take all of those assumptions with you down a dirt road. Gas might be 100 miles away (whoops, that station closed ten years ago, hope you have enough to make it 50 more miles), you probably won't have a cell signal, and once you're off U. S. and state highways all bets are off as to road conditions or if the road even exists anymore.

After all this typing, it just occurred to me how some of these tragedies could be avoided, and in one sentence: if you're not a local, not experienced in off-pavement driving (especially in the mountains), and are not equipped to spend a few nights out there if you absolutely had to, then the instant the road turns to dirt, turn around; no exceptions. For the folks that drive off bridges, sorry, my only advice is to turn in your keys.

App idea: a "city trainer" GPS navigator. You input your destination, but it doesn't give directions. You still try to navigate to the destination using your mental map. The app warns you if you seem to be getting lost.

It probably wouldn't be very popular...

I think the part that baffles me the most is that these drivers blindly do what the GPS says and drive straight into a lake.

I regularly see tourists here in Australia do very odd things and sometimes I can't help but feel a little xenophobic.

If you're the type of person who ever takes scenic routes, do yourself a favor and buy a PLB. You can get an ACR ResQLink for $250, they last up to 10 years, and they work nearly everywhere.

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096978

Used a GPS with outdated map (too cheap to buy the new update) a few years back. Construction with ramps in Boston, thing almost had me driving off a 200ft cliff.

This is a likely way that I die. Other option is ran over while riding my bike by a SUV or a giant pickup truck with a lift.

Had they simply entered Las Vegas from the beginning, it would have got them there no problem..

All you coders out there say it with me: "cost function".

Really, is that so hard? I see a lot of comments about what is going to happen when robotic cars do this. Well, every roboticist I know, and I know a big bunch of them, is well acquainted with the concept of having a cost-map overlay on the world map. And it is not only OK, but common, to have infinite cost assigned to many nodes -- "Don't go there robot, you will not be a happy robot."

So why does the GPS database have poorly assigned cost values on certain road segments? Perhaps because QA de-prioritizes little-traveled roads?

But more to the point -- I'll get out of roboticist mode and into seasoned backwoods traveler mode for a moment -- don't go where you are not prepared to go. Look at a paper map, ask a local at the gas station about conditions, and if the road ends up bruising your kidneys, turn back.

Uhm. You cannot blame GPS for the bad maps in navigation systems. GPS knows nothing about roads. That's the maps in your satnav.