Drivers followed a Google Maps detour and ended up stuck in an empty field

Travelling 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.

What 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?

Years 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.

This 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."

Reminds 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.

Happened 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.

I 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.

I 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?

I 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.

A 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.

Heh, 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.

I'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.

I 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.

What 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.

This doesn't look like the road to the airport.

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?

I 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...

Errors 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.

As 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.

I'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.

Can someone related to Google answer me - why doesn't Google have an option to "Avoid unpaved roads"?

I 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.

Well, 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...

Haha 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!

Google 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.

For 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.

There'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

[2]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/codewise

I 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.

Could be worse...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS

Yeah... 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.

It is tempting to "follow the herd". I guess sometimes optimism gets you in trouble.

I wonder what OpenStreetMaps shows for the detour. I find OSM often more detailed than Google Maps.

Google 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!

Whenever 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.

The 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.

I 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.

As 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 :)

When watching a movie, hackers would hack the traffic lights to cause chaos. I can't wait to see a twist, hack Google maps instead.

It seems like an extra option 'Avoid dirt roads' - an option that TomTom offers - would be useful here

Was rv'ing in utah and Google maps tried to take me through some field via a dirt road in the middle of the night.

I had a similar experience when I was traveling in Bali Indonesia rural areas.

It'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

The first instinct of moderners will be to snicker at the Pokémon fad

It's called "Death by GPS".

It happens every week to me in Serbia.

Could be the starting plot of an amazing "Black Mirror" episode!

I just got offered google Maps beta this morning, this could be fun.........

Google may send people the wrong way, but the choice to drive in a muddy field is the driver, and driver's alone

Title 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.