SatNav Errors

Not a satnav error...

2009-11-18T15:30:00.003Z

81-year-old Australian man becomes lost driving to the shops, ends up almost 600km away.

"...He rejected a suggestion to get a satellite navigation system.
'Why would you want one of those? You can't get lost. There is no fun in that.'"

Avoid Aberystwyth, Wolverhampton and London

2009-05-28T23:31:00.003Z

Why? Because they're the cities where drivers (mainly men of course) amuse themselves most by challenging their satnavs to a duel.

Life without SatNav

2009-05-18T12:34:00.003Z

James May issues his 6-Point SatNav Elimination Plan.

"I used to champion satnav, but I've come to realise that it's turning people into morons. Satnav is nothing more than a navigational aid, but I now find myself working with people who treat it as an autopilot, swerve mindlessly on roundabouts and then look hurt when they end up in a supermarket car park.

"The problem with satnav, and especially for someone like me, for whom Britain is conceptually upside down and who has no innate sense of direction, is that it doesn't teach you anything. Following a satnav is like looking at a map down a bog-roll tube, and gives no sense of where Upper Chodford is in relation to the rest of the world."

SatNav - Not Just For Errors

2009-04-30T12:54:00.002Z

Lest it be thought I'm not a fan of satnav systems:

Navteq survey finds that satnav systems make drivers 12% more fuel-efficient

And they're fun too!

Man follows satnav to edge of a precipice

2009-03-25T21:59:00.002Z

BMW driver in West Yorkshire emulates my example and for his sins gets charged with driving without due care and attention. A better charge would be "undue trust and inappropriate perseverence".

BBC Video report

UK Satnav GPS black spots identifed

2009-03-25T08:36:00.005Z

UK political party the Liberal Democrats has published a list of the worst locations in the country for satnav errors.

Fom the Telegraph:

"In 2006, the Government promised to update the law on satnav systems.

"It promised to ensure that the devices did not encourage "rat-running" or give illegal advice to the user.

"But, according to Mr Baker, nothing has been done. 'The rise in the use of satnav devices has led to a doubling of the number of large vehicles hitting rail bridges.

"'This has the potential to be extremely dangerous. The Government must act to make satnav devices safer for large vehicles.

"'The Government promised to look at this problem over two years ago, but has completely failed to act,'" he added."

Not really surprising -- it's hard to see what could be done to fix this.

Lost in California

2009-01-26T19:43:00.002Z

"Garmin sells a simple and reliable device. Unfortunately, it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for using your brain."

CNET's Charles Cooper tells a familiar tale
.

Heavy Trucks Arbitraging the Country Lane System Suffer the Fate of All Short Sellers

2008-10-23T17:11:00.003Z

Cotswold villagers have finally lost patience with truck drivers arbitraging maps using satnav to exploit short cuts through country lanes and are
banning them from the area.

Cornish village councillors take an enlightened approach

2008-10-01T19:17:00.002Z

Residents of a Cornish village have released a map of satnav-vulnerable trouble spots which lorry drivers can download to update their databases.

BBC News video link

Technorati test post

2008-05-29T17:09:00.001Z

Technorati Profile

New York Times Discovers SatNav Errors

2007-12-05T12:54:00.000Z

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.”

Link

Onwards, into the mud

2007-11-13T01:09:00.000Z

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

2007-11-11T19:45:00.000Z

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

Link

Google to the rescue

2007-11-08T00:31:00.000Z

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

2007-11-04T20:09:00.000Z

Link

via The Map Room

Proactive approach to avoiding satnav errors emerges in Wales.

2007-09-05T12:32:00.000Z

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"

2007-01-24T23:45:00.001Z

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

2007-01-24T23:30:00.000Z

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

2007-01-24T23:21:00.001Z

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

2007-01-24T23:01:00.001Z

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

2007-01-24T22:45:00.001Z

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

2007-01-15T13:05:00.001Z

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

2007-01-02T13:54:00.000Z

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

Typo takes tourist 13,000 km out

More on the Kim case

2006-12-08T19:32:00.001Z

News reports confirm that Kim and his family took a route noted for its hostile winter conditions.

""Authorities say the cyber-savvy family may have plucked the route from Grants Pass to Gold Beach from an online mapping service, unaware of the elements," AP reported.

"Despite its impassable snowdrifts and single lane, Bear Camp Road is offered as the preferred route on some websites and on-board-directions software available on some new cars. And most of those have no business in those mountains in the winter."

However from another AP story, we can infer that the Kims were not using a satnav device after all.

"Driving south on Interstate 5, the Kims had missed the turnoff to the coast and instead drove through the Siskiyou National Forest.

"They passed signs warning that Bear Camp Road may be blocked by snow, but kept going. At times, James had to stick his head out the window to see through the falling snow, said state police Lt. Gregg Hastings.

They descended into a confusing warren of logging roads.

By the time they turned around, they were 15 miles off Bear Camp Road and stopped where they hoped to be spotted from the air, fearing they were running out of gas, searchers said. "

Whatever satnav's foibles, problems tend to occur through creating unrealistic expectations, not through getting lost. We may yet be looking at a more traditional Petrol Tank error.

Lost

2006-12-07T22:24:00.001Z

I never knew James Kim. I'd never even heard of him before he was lost in Oregon, and had never read anything he wrote before he died. But it seems appropriate to dedicate this, the first post of SatNav Errors, to his memory. At the time of writing I'm not sure of the circumstances that led to his car getting stuck in the mountains, but at least one blogger has speculated that it was a satnav error that led him and his family astray.

James Kim was a technology writer. He was taking his family on a road trip through unfamiliar roads across beautiful mountains. It is hard to imagine someone with an interest in gadgets both personally and professionally not taking this opportunity to make the most of a satnav system.

Prompted by radio speculation as to whether satnav had a played a part in the Kim family predicament, Microacer, having himself had the experience of being led by satnav into a firing range, decided to check the route that Google Maps or Mapquest would suggest for the route from Grants Pass to Gold Beach. He found that some of the roads recommended by Google, which perhaps derive from similar databases used by satnav routefinders, are only open in the summer.

I experienced a pale echo of this experience last summer. I was on a road trip with my family in north-west Italy. We had been delighted by the performance of our own GPS gadget, a ViaMichelin X-950T, with a range of voices in different languages, but whose winsome English voice by common consent was much the nicest. We dubbed her Charlotte Pam.

It had been a wet holiday so far. Faced with another day of apprently constant rain, and not being the hardy sort who enjoy stomping through wet undergrowth, we decided to drive around beautiful Lake Orta, preferably descending from the heights down to the lakeside. The map didn't show a road, but it was too small scale and in any case Charlotte Pam seemed to know a way.

I turned off the main road and we began our descent. Occasionally Charlotte Pam would give us a "Turn left" at a hairpin bend, when to do otherwise would have been suicidal. But often there seemed to be a little pathway going down a steeper way. This perhaps gave a clue that her database was to say the least a bit, er, dated.

The road itself got smaller, and steeper. I hoped we wouldn't meet another car coming the other way. We needn't have worried. Where we were going, no cars came from.

The rain intensified. As the road continued to dwindle and my daughters began to protest, I persevered. I stayed the course.

"At the junction, turn left". The junction in question gave onto a small road down the forested mountainside that seemed to be inclined at about 45 degrees. It was marked with a white circle ringed with red: the international sign for "No access".

I pressed on. I told myself that the road was bound to open out again once we got close enough to the lake. It was lucky that with Charlotte Pam we could enjoy the luxury of finding routes that were denied to those constrained by conventional maps. We just had to get past this rocky patch.

We turned left again. The road was now only just wide enough for the car to squeeze through. It was rocky indeed: On one side were rocks and brambles, which scratched the paintwork. The other side was a sheer drop into a steep forest.

By now at least part of my reason for pressing on was fear at the prospect of having to reverse up what was not much more than a donkey track. We certainly couldn't turn round.

At last we came to a bend to the right. The road petered out to a muddy track, next to a deserted church structure worthy of the Blair Witch Project. On our left, through the pelting rain we could see what looked like a half-finished house. It was inhabited, but only by a fierce guard dog.

At this point I had to stop, get out and see what became of the track that disappeared to the right behind the church. After passing over a small crumbling concrete platform about five feet wide propped on rusty struts over a precipice, I could just see that the track became a footpath: the sort that in happier times and better weather might have made for quite a pleasant walk downwards to the still-invisible lake.

As I walked back to the car I felt real fear. I could not see how we could get the car, a Passat Estate, back up the road we had come down. Even if we could turn round, the rain would make the rocks slippery. And there was no-one about to help.

I got in the car and gingerly tried to turn it around. Mercifully we'd stopped at the first and only place where a three-point turn was physically possible. Next we tried driving very slowly up the track, but as I'd feared the rocks got us when we tried to turn right. The front wheels spun noisily but helplessly and began to smoke, which scared the children more than anything so far.

Thinking of people escaping ruts in the desert, or in the snow, I had the idea of bringing out our picnic rug to get some traction, but it was no good. The rug just melted between the tyres and the rocks, and we were stuck.

At this point, as the time approached 5.00 pm with the threat of encroaching darkness, I reflected that even if we found a farm in the area they wouldn't have a tractor. Tractors make no sense in the mountains -- except perhaps as a paying service to drag tourists out of satnav traps of their own making.

We walked up the hill, and that was when our luck changed, and our story therefore became less interesting. We found three Swiss second-homers, a father, his son and his son's partner, working on the chalet next to the "No Access" sign. They gallantly offered to come down and give us a push, saying that we were the second group of people to come to grief down there. I was not optimistic that we could be saved merely by human muscle-power, but they did it. They got us over the hump and they and the rest of my family followed on foot as I gingerly retraced our tyre-tracks back up to safety.

James Kim and his family might well have had a similar experience to ours, right up until the point where we managed to find help. The difference was that they were in serious mountain conditions, in the snow and in winter. And there was clearly no human habitation for miles around.

By now satnav errors are a familar part of the minor news item landscape. We're all familiar with the routine: BMW driver (for some reason it tends to be BMW drivers) places more trust in his satnav than in his own eyes and ends up in the drink. Or in a sandpile. Or on a railway track.

If it is true that James Kim died as a result of a satnav error, it places a whole new perspective on what has tended to be an "...and finally" type of story. SatNav errors have become a matter of life and death.