New York Times Discovers SatNav Errors

News of the phenomenon spreads to a country where strangely little is heard of it -- presumably because the roads are so big and the network so geometric that it is a novel phenomenon.

It's certainly true that satnav errors are essentally a characteristic of small rural roads (or roads taht turn out to be paths or fords...).

“We’ve heard some very hilarious stories where people just blindly follow the sat nav instructions,” said Vince Yearley, a spokesman for the Institute of Advanced Motorists, using British shorthand for “satellite navigation.” “Like if the sat nav says, ‘Drive into this muddy field,’ they think, ‘That’s weird,’ but they do it anyway.”

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Onwards, into the mud

The normal journalistic angle when reporting satnav errors is either to crow at the overpaid technophile's fall from grace, or to tut-tut at the truck drivers from central Europe getting stuck or destroying cottages in English country lanes. In fact one of the crucial features of these incidents is the way in which the route can look so plausible to begin with, and how the true nature of the road can only become apparent when it's too difficult to turn round -- combined with a sense of how far you would have to go back if you were to give up now. Combine that with a tendency towards obstinacy and bloody-mindedness and you have the makings of a classic satnav error.

John Cleese portrayed it perfectly years when satnav was unheard of in Michael Frayn's film Clockwise. Determined to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that he has directed his old flame driving the car up a blind alley, he directs her to press on regardless, in an attempt to find a short cut back to the main road. Instead things just get worse and worse and even when they find themselves crossing a field, the watchword is onwards, ever onwards... into the mud.

Satnav truckers "damaging village restoration work" in Welsh villages

First rule of architectural conservation: get your satnav signs up first.

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Google to the rescue

Not much help to satnav error victims perhaps because the essence of a SNE is that you don't recognize it -- or perhaps will not admit it -- until it's too late (the symbol of all SNE victims should be that of the frog boiling slowly to death over an increasing hear).

However Google, as ever, propose a novel angle on an existing use case by providing wayfinding maps at petrol pumps.

Satnav error leaves Czech lorry driver wedged in English country lane for three nights

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via The Map Room

Proactive approach to avoiding satnav errors emerges in Wales.

A Welsh council has put up a sign warning lorry drivers to ignore their satellite navigation systems after faulty sat-nav directions caused traffic chaos.

'Ignore sat-nav' sign posted to protect village

Comments elsewhere on the merits of the design itself.

Satnav error "destroys village"

I think this report in the Metro may just err on the side of overstatement.

"A lorry driver has wrecked a tiny village after his sat nav sent him the wrong way."

"...As the driver tried to negotiate his way along the village's small roads he caused chaos, demolishing a lamp post, destroying hedgerows and [w]alls and causing a four hour traffic jam when he finally got stuck."

Pensioners trapped for four hours down country lane

Back in the land of "And finally...", a group of 30 pensioners, some of them in wheelchairs, apparently missed out on a pub lunch after their coach became stuck between steep grass banks on a sharp bend.

"A farmer gave them tea and biscuits and allowed them to use his lavatory as the driver tried to find a way out of the single-track lane.

"Eventually the only solution was to drive the coach across three recently harvested fields to rejoin the main road." Shades of Clockwise.

The words of the driver's more experienced colleague in her defence testify to a familiar pattern of satnav error behaviour.

"She put her destination into the sat-nav to bring up an alternative route and it sent her down the lane. As she made her way down the lane she began to realise she may be in a spot of bother but instead of stopping when she should, she tried to press on. We all make mistakes."

Miscellaneous incidents

The Mail article referred to in the previous post provides an amusing miscellany of recent satnav errors that had come to their attention.

"It was revealed a Four Tops tribute band missed a concert this week after they set their satnav system for Chelmsford instead of Cheltenham."

More alarmingly, "a woman dodged oncoming traffic for 14 miles after misreading her satnav and driving the wrong way up a dual carriageway. The young woman, who has not been named, joined the A3M - which links Portsmouth and London - on the southbound side but then headed north.She drove almost a third of the way to London in the fast lane before she was stopped by police at a roundabout near Liss in Hampshire."

More typical is the reference on the Wiltshire village of Luckington, where "dozens of drivers have blithely followed directions from their satnav systems, not realising that the recommended route goes through a ford. Several motorists have had to be towed out."

Here, reports the Mail, "enterprising local farmers have capitalised on this, charging motorists £25 a time to rescue their stranded vehicles."

Satnav takes emergency ambulance on mystery tour

Talking of life and death, a report in the Telegraph from May 2006 reports how an ambulance was led a tortuous route on its way to help a child who had been knocked down in the street. The same thing happened on the way back to the hospital. Both routes took twice as long as normal.

"At one stage in the journey its satellite navigation system directed it into a narrow lane it could not negotiate, forcing it to reverse and try a different route. Having picked up the girl, it then took a circuitous route to the hospital, where she had a precautionary scan of her head."

The crew was not local. How did they manage these things in pre-satnav days?

A more recent incident reported in the Mail involved an ambulance on a thirty-minute errand in London being misdirected 200 miles away to Manchester.

"The London Ambulance Service crew were asked to take a mental health patient from King George ' s Hospital in Ilford to a specialist hospital in Brentwood, a journey that should take about 30 minutes.

"However, the fault on their on-board navigation system meant they were sent north and ended up on an eight-hour round trip.

"The crew are understood to be new to the job and had never been to the mental health hospital."

Cruising for harbingers

Dave Winer, incidentally the inventor of blogging and outlining, and a commentator whose amusing rants I've been following for as long (ten years) as he's been blogging, has a satnav thought . What if commercial vendors get together with the carmakers (or one might say, the GPS device manufacturers or digital mapping providers) to introduce the mapping equivalent of sponsored search results in a suggested route?

"There's no way the GPS knew there was a convenience store there (a national brand, btw), but in five or ten years, I'm sure they will. And further, Toyota will make a deal with the chain to direct traffic by their store, as opposed to their competition. Remember in a lot of businesses it's all about location. What if someday everyone has GPS, like everyone has automatic transmission now (they didn't used to, believe it or not). That could be much more valuable than advertising. It's not about impressions, it's about delivering customers. Literally!"

What is interesting is his insight that a satnav device is essentially a search engine for the real world. The implication is that all kinds of business models that have been developed for internet search engines could work equally well for satnav devices. I'm not sure that sponsored search is an example I'm particularly looking forward to.

SatNav Errors Triumphs Already

That must count as some kind of record!

Within a month of launching, after three posts and before anyone has even noticed SatNav Errors exists, AutoExpress reports that Navteq will add information such as road widths and bridge heights to their database in the UK. They must be running scared of the enormous consumer power this blog will be able to mobilize as soon someone starts reading it...

Apparently similar measures are on the way in other countries, but it remains to be seen how/whether this data will affect consumer units, which don't currently allow you to input your car width, height, or for that matter how wide a road needs to be before you'd touch it with a bargepole.

Sydney error

One example of the possibilities for geographical amplification of a spelling error:

Typo takes tourist 13,000 km out