A GPS error thread (GPS leading folks astray)

Map Editors Community United States Utah
1

The purpose of such a thread is to capture news reports about the risks of GPS navigation. Utah and other western states have had people die due to following their GPS’s. So while on one hand the founder of Waze says he want’s everything mapped, we the editors have an obligation to map accurately but safely. We the local editors must determine when to not map a road or at least to map it as Dirt.

The idea for this thread was prompted by this article https://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=26792772&title=driver-follows-gps-gets-semitrailer-stuck-in-butterfield-canyon&fm=home_page&s_cid=featured-1 This ended well but it shows the risk of mapping every mountain road and or the risk of the limited road types we have available. That road is paved, so marking it as Dirt 4x4 isn’t an option, it’s a street but that gives nothing to indicate that it’s not the fastest route and that it’s very twisty. Basically a truckers GPS shouldn’t have taken him over that route. Most if not all Wazers should be fine, but we can use this as an example of the caution needed in mapping.

p.s. I’m starting it in the Utah sub-forum as I couldn’t decide where exactly to put this, if someone higher wants to move it to a more visible location feel free.

2

Thanks for bringing this article up; I too saw it in the news and wondered what we might do to avoid such things in the future. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that we are somewhat limited as to the types of roads we can input into Waze. Like the mentioned story, it would be really helpful to have a designation for perhaps Mountain Roads, which though paved, are incredibly contorted, and are also often closed off seasonally.

There are many other examples where some more specific road types could help drivers be more careful on the road. Perhaps a warning by Waze, if you try to enter such a road, would be appropriate? Or, when you input a route, and if it included a more precarious route, such as the one above, it warned you that such a route would include such a road, so you could use an alternate route?

Anyway, I appreciate daknife bringing this up, and I agree that something needs to be done.

3

And another one though the situation here is a little different. Bad or at least questionable instructions results in accident. http://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2013/11/26/mjf-river-road-collision-driver-follows-bad-gps-advice/

This one proves that you the driver are ultimately at fault for all you do, GPS is a guide and a tool. But awareness of the surrounding traffic must not be neglected.

4

Did some digging to find this thread, and I believe it is an important one.
Good advice to our editors and a possible tool to get some action from waze on the road types that have been requested.
Thanks for posting daknife, I for one would like to see this thread moved up to higher viewing status.

5

So would I, but until we can scratch up some more instances from around the country it’s probably not gonna get moved.

6

Ply’s response prompted me to do a brief Google hunt and I found a funny event. Even in Europe people find themselves led astray by their GPS devices or apps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/9798779/GPS-failure-leaves-Belgian-woman-in-Zagreb-two-days-later.html

7

And some more incidents including the one above, all luckily non-fatal.
http://theweek.com/article/index/243813/8-drivers-who-blindly-followed-their-gps-into-disaster
And I’ll finish tonight’s posting with this last article from 2011 about the hazards. I’ll try to resist digging through historical incidents and news reports in the future.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/death-gps-could-it-happen-you-125321.

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If I have your okay, I would like to post a thread in the Arizona forum with a link to this thread to attempt more involvement.
As to the posts of future articles, keep them coming and I will do some research also, those are what give the basis to the importance of this thread.

9

I don’t have an article, but rather an anecdote… :smiley:

I was driving up to Philadelphia from New Orleans. On I-81 in western Virginia I came across a total closure of the Interstate in a rural area, probably somewhere near Harrisonburg… I waited for a good 45 minutes before taking the emergency turnaround and trying US 11, which runs parallel to 81 in the area.

Of course, traffic was quite bad going that way as well, so I tried an even more drastic measure, knowing if I went eastward long enough along mountain roads I could get to I-95, which runs north from Richmond to DC and beyond. So I looked on my TomTom and planned myself a route. All was well, for a good half hour or so of the fun kind of white-knuckle driving in the Prius, until I came to see a huge tow truck with its driver waving me away, like “go back, go back!”

I kept going anyway, passing a sign with a picture of a hairpin turn and the text “5 MPH”, only to see another huge tow truck and, then, an 18-wheeler jackknifed around that hairpin turn! Yikes.

That was it, I turned around and headed back to 81 and waited another half hour or so before traffic started moving. If it wasn’t for that truck taking that route — I can’t imagine it was because of anything besides a GPS — I would have probably made it through to the other side. Oh well!

10

Hi everyone… I was prompted to read this thread because I am working on Wiki articles with related threads on Forest Service Roads and Indian Reservation Roads.

After reading the few articles mentioned here, I thin it is a worthy discussion but I’ve really seen no objective evidence that this is critical. I also have not seen suggested approaches to deal with the perceived threat, which is probably OK since I have not seen a real threat.

One article talked about a woman, :slight_smile: could have been anyone, changing her mind in traffic after she already committed to an alternative action. That’s her fault, not the GPS. The other articles were about Semi Trailers. They have a special responsibility to deal with their larger vehicle, yet so many of them plow into overpasses that are too low. They need to know some roads are marked for them not to use because they weigh too much. They should know not to go down a hairpin turn route too. That’s just negligence if they mess up like what is in the article.

We have no real tools to differentiate if a road can be traversed by cars but not trucks due to their length. I would venture an offer that Waze programmers could easily add a feature in the client that would designate what kind of vehicle you were using (Semi, car, 4x4 car/truck, ATV, motorcycle, and any number of factors). Then, without any changes to the map, they could give some instruction. For instance, if roads had too tight of turns, they would ward off Semi Trailers so they didn’t get stuck. That would require no action by the editor population and would be a much better solution. If you entered in the height of your Semi’s load and weight, Waze could warn about height and weight restrictions (if it had the data).

The only place I see this thread intersecting the USFS or Indian Reservation road topics is that in rural areas, well maintained dirt roads should be marked as streets, not dirt road 4x4 trails. They are used as streets. Even so, who knows if their maintenance will deteriorate or if there is a seasonal variation in that road that is significant. Yea, you could add a seasonal closure. It all goes back to the driver deciding to not turn down a road or turn around if the road is not quite what they want to travel.

Does anyone have a real, actionable GPS issue that could be solved by how we edit the map?

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I’d really like to see a way to discriminate between garden variety unpaved roads and roads that are really trails. “Dirt Road/4x4 Trail” doesn’t really tell you much; there’s roads in my area (VA) that are gravel but other than that they’re perfectly fine roads. I’d set Waze to avoid them if I’m driving my car, but if I’m in the Jeep… I’d like to know the difference between something that is a non-issue and something that actually qualifies as challenging terrain.

I believe that this has been mentioned before, but nothing has really come of it…

12

I will offer this link:
http://www.ranker.com/list/9-car-accidents-caused-by-google-maps-and-gps/robert-wabash?page=1
#4 seems to jump out as an issue that could have been prevented with proper elevation settings.
My thoughts are this thread leads to an understanding for editors to take the editing responsibility seriously by knowing that there are folks out there who simply follow the routing commands, even when they make no sense, and though fault can be placed on the driver, it is important for us editing to give good routing solutions as the waze app promotes.

13

Yeah, a similar distinction would be nice depending on whether I flew or drove to my gf’s small hometown in Michigan (that is, whether I was in my car or just a rental! :lol: ). Not that there are any challenging mountain roads in southeast Michigan…

14

Good point, but can we do it with the tools we have in the editor? It would seem not from a “complete” standpoint. It’s a balance between too restrictive or too permissive. Marking anything not paved as a 4x4 road would deny access to such roads. That would be particularly bad where such roads are critical (rural, sw areas). Marking everything streets would at least inconvenience someone in giving them the wrong route – and we’d have to assume they’d not travel down the road once they noticed it was too rough. I guess that points to regional discretion of the editors to understand where to make the decision. One rule does not fit all.

If you take a look at the USFS maintenance classification page at https://www.waze.com/wiki/Forest_Service_Roads, there is a set of pictures that give different levels of a dirt road maintenance. For USFS roads, I suggest a mapping to Waze road types. I know many non-paved roads are not USFS, but this shows that someone is thinking about how to classify what kinds of vehicles can travel over different types of unpaved roads.

15

While working on public and Indian Reservation roads wiki pages, I found this item that was relevant to this discussion. It was on a National Park Service page about Death Valley. It shows that increasingly more people are using their GPS devices to go to parks… Of course, Death Valley is not in the center of civilization:

http://www.nps.gov/deva/planyourvisit/directions.htm

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Since Vector asked what’s the value let me see if I can explain my purpose in this thread.
Over the last several years as GPS navigation has become first possible, then viable and now popular, there have been several incidents that have resulted in, or could have easily resulted in fatalities.

Such events as a family traveling through Utah following their GPS blindly as it took them on ever worsening trails to the point they ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere in the desert. The route their GPS was following was trying to take them along included the need to travel over a government surveyors trail that was never passable by motorized vehicles. I remember the story clearly but could not find a news report to link.

And there was the family trying to head to CA for the holidays, and their GPS routed them over a pass that is closed every winter, They were traveling during a storm and didn’t realize the road was closed until the snow was so deep they were stuck, again resulting in deaths. (This has happened a few times, not always with fatal results).

Now both of these key events were easily avoidable had the drivers stopped when the pavement or plowed roads ended. But people believe these devices and apps are giving them the best (shortest and or fastest) routes. We even encourage Wazers to trust the all knowing Waze as it may be trying to route them around traffic problems even when the route seems odd.

So with that in mind I wanted a thread to share such incidents, so that we as editors, particularly here in Utah where we have both deserts and snow closed mountain passes, could keep such in mind when looking at these issues.

That we would ensure that our dirt and 4x4 roads are terminated at reasonable points. Rather than continue onto mule trails, ATV trails, or other routes not passable by a highway legal vehicle. And that we either watch and edit seasonal passes (old method) or implement long term time based restrictions (current method).

Sharing these stories can serve as warning about our responsibilities as well as the occasional laugh (the semi tractors). But most of all to remind us to be aware of how blindly the many, many Michael Scotts of the world do follow their gadgets.

Thus the purpose of this topic. Not necessarily to point out specific edits that must be made, or to discuss road types but to promote editor awareness of a very real and very serious issue.

Also note, I’ve changed the threat title in case a Champ wants to move it to the US page or at least out to the US Southwest forum so that more can see it without digging.

17

Cbenson shared this link on another thread, it fits right in. http://www.kgw.com/news/Oregon-truck-driver-blames-GPS-for-Idaho-mishap-258473531.html

Tapatalking via my Galaxy S4