Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

I live on an old farm. I'm connected to a neighbour by a track that is narrow, has a steep drop with no barrier and a ford at the bottom. After decent rain, the ford is more like a full-blown river. It is a public footpath but otherwise is only suitable for quads or farm machinery. There's no way of turning around when you're committed. There is not a road or bridleway, there is no public access unless on foot.

At some point, presumably from satellite imagery, Google decided this was a road.

Now google maps regularly directs folk down my private drive and on to the track where they have a terrifying journey or end up having to be towed by a tractor. No amount of 'report a problem' tickets have resolved this and it's been going on for years now.

German tourists...who did make it out alive.

Recalling a family of German tourists in America, who sadly did not - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans

(And if you've not read the tale, and have some spare time, this is a classic - https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu... )

I remember going to a town marked on a rand mcnally map in British Columbia once, it was small but clearly a settlement.

This was before the days of smartphone maps

Roads became unpaved, then turned into dirt tracks, then eventually little more than grass.

Eventually got there and there was a single ruin of a shed next to a railway line. There had never been a settlement there - I suspect it was a copyright trap.

We had a compass, a fix on our location, and enough to keep warm and fed and were less than a day’s walk from the main road, but the point is people got lost and misdirected by maps well before the days of GPS and google maps.

Such occurrences are so common today, there is even a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS

It is a combination of bad planning and bad judgement that wouldn’t kill you in urban areas (where ambulance response time is below 10 minutes) but can get very dangerous in remote areas in no time. The couple has hopefully learned their lesson. They were very lucky.

Google here routinely sends people on really bad tracks you have a hard time turning around or backing around from unless you are experienced with/on them and with the car you are driving. People this happens to are usually tourists with rental cars so they don't know the terrain or the car. When they turn to ask for help I often ask how you thought it was a good idea to get of the actual road with signs and asphalt and got onto the dirt track that seems to be made of loose stones and sand and goes on a 20+ degrees incline into somewhere you cannot see. Didn't you look on the map before you went right, to see if there even is anything there. Google said they had to go there even though most of these paths don't go anywhere... Did they use to? I don't know but not the past 15 years I have lived here. It's weird.

Also, reminds me of: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/man-fr...

The quality of google maps routing has become terrible over the past few years. I sometimes visit a few Indian cities on work. There are many places that you can walk to. Interestingly, Apple maps on my iPhone shows me at least 2-3 good walking routes, while google maps tries to get me killed on busy thoroughfares or tells me to walk across eight lanes of peak-hour traffic.

When taking a cab, google maps increasingly routes me through narrow roads, streets that can only accommodate a bike, or the wrong way in one-way roads. Apple maps usually gets it right. Sometimes google routes are just plain wrong - it takes me to the wrong destination - and I'm left scratching my head as to how the heck any algorithm that worked earlier could do this now.

I remember a time when Google maps was not this terrible.

I’m not familiar with modern (or any, for that matter...) car navigation systems. Do they have a big "NO!" button? The ones I have seen seemed very intent on planning one route, and then following that, no matter what. If you could not make a turn because it was blocked by some road works or whatever, the satnav would just keep trying to direct you back to that point. It would have been nice with a big NO/UNABLE button to push to get an alternative route.

The world is so easy and automated that people turn their brains off (or maybe didn't even have on in the first place) and don't have a "wait this doesn't seem right" reflex.

I thought we stopped blaming the computer for idiot drivers 20 years ago when it was Garmin and Tom Tom rather than Google.

Is it really the fault of Google Maps for not reporting the current mud status?

It feels pretty far out of its scope.

It looks like indeed there is no overland road to Bamaga.

Stories like this always remind me of when I first moved from my small town to the big city. I did so with another guy from my town who was going to the same college as I was. It's an 18-hour drive to the town I went to college in... So my buddy and I decide to go together, and his dad will drive us in their truck. This was also over 20 years ago. The morning of they show up, we load up, say goodbye to my family, and off we go! About 10 minutes in my buddy giddily said to me "It's only going to take us 14 hours! We found a shortcut!" - and he pulls out 2 pages of printed-out MapQuest instructions.

...26 hours later and various 6ft wide logging paths later, we arrived at college!