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Satellite Navigation a Real Crackpot!
debest writes "What happens when your satellite navigation system in your car gives you bad advice on which road you should take? In Britain, these systems have been directing drivers down a road near the (aptly named) town of Crackpot that is strewn with boulders and has an unprotected 100ft dropoff on one side! The locals are worried someone's going to go off the edge."
Treat it for depression, give it plenty of (if its voice command) encouraging words or (if its tap-n-go) a good rub, but be sure to keep an eye on it; its obviously has suicidal tendancies.
Demented But Determined.
Is why are the british drivers punching in "crackpot" as their destination? Agreed that GPS Nav works like magic, but this is too much optimism. What did they expect, a list of all local crack joints with directions?
""What happens when your satellite navigation system in your car gives you bad advice on which road you should take?"
Not much different than that gas station attendant five miles back.
Come on, if back in the early 1980s you could get a sentient talking car, then why in 2006 do we settle for these simple guidance systems that are so limited they could get us killed?
You got it all wrong. The satellites have figured out that we're stopping their direct influence with our tinfoil hats, so now they have to resort to more subtle means to rid the planet of human vermin.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
1) Put up a sign reading "Don't go down this road, even if your GPS tells you to; Dangerous conditions ahead".
2) Stabilize the slope above and install a guard rail.
Hey now, come on, this story is cute and funny in a safely humorous, non-tech way. I don't know about you, but I want to know about every navigation bug affecting rural UK folk. Just what I expect here at /. Boy oh boy, let me tell you about the time Yahoo! Maps told me to take the I405 instead of I5 to go to South Seattle from Lynnwood. FRONT PAGE NEWS!
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Is there a reason that they haven't put a railing on the "unprotected 100ft dropoff" edge?
...put up a sign "Toll Road Ahead".
I had a similar problem recently while driving through Pennsylvania. I had set my car's GPS computer to lead me to Intercourse, but no matter what I pushed it I could only reach Bird in Hand. Of course, I've had this problem with web pages on my PC at home before, so I really can't blame the mapping company.
In Crackpot there's more than one way to go off the deep end! /rimshot
There are a couple of problems with these things, both familiar to MapQuest users.
...
1) Things change. New roads (sometimes whole communities) get built, and there is some latency in getting that updated data where it can be used by your GPS-mapper (whether in your car or on the web).
2) Driving-direction algorithims are good, but not flawless. MapQuest, for example, provides driving directions that will usually get you where you want to go, but may have you take an odd route to get there.
The bottom line: If you expect your Tom-Tom (or whatever) to magically do all of your thinking for you, you'll eventually wind up going over an 'unexpected' cliff
I live in noplace, TN.. I got sent down a dirt road via mapquest onetime. Eventually, I came out at my destination. The point is, that the map software only sees roads.. Not the quality of the roads. Really, ideally, these kinds of roads wouldn't have made their way into the map database at all.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
If a computer tells you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
"Don't drive there! The road ends on a cliff and we'll all fall off and die horribly!" "But the GPS directions say to go that way!" "Oh, in that case, no problem. "
Some time back when GPS's in cars were fairly new, I rented a Hertz car with a GPS while on a business trip to Colorado. I didn't ask for the GPS, they just gave it to me. At the end of my trip I decided to try out the GPS, so I programmed it to return me to the Colorado Springs airport. I missed the first turn to the airport but no problem, the GPS said it had an alternate route. So I followed the route until it said I had reached my destination. All I could see however was miles of nothing and a big chain link fence. The GPS insisted I was at the airport however. Finally I dug out the rental car map and it showed me that the GPS had led me to the back side of the airport. I almost missed my flight because of that stupid GPS.
I bet that won't be in an OnStar ad anytime soon. Too bad.
>I had set my car's GPS computer to lead me to Intercourse
maybe you should try match.com, I hear that works pretty well. It must be better than your gps, at least.
This adspace for sale! Inquire within!
Are the people taking this road all getting directions from a GPS??? Granted a GPS in a car isn't uncommon, but I dont know anybody who has one. I have a GPS, sadly not 1 in my truck. So would taking it out of the data base really help? I could be wrong, but I find it hard to beleive that everyone taking that road is being told by their GPS, also...for such a well traveled road, why not get rid of the bolders, pave it and put up a gaurd rail. Just a thought.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
Keep in mind this is the country that gave the world Charles Darwin. It's obviously a form of... encoraged natural selection.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Maps told me to take the I405 instead of I5 to go to South Seattle from Lynnwood. FRONT PAGE NEWS!
That's actually a good idea some parts of the day. I5 backs up when it goes to 2 lanes in central Seattle.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The locals are so worried about this. Just like, in the days of sailing ships, the villagers who put up fake lights were very worried that some ship might run aground on the rocks. I say we see who in this village is hacking the GPS. First place to look...the suspiciously wellstocked local secondhand store.
I knew I should've bought a squirrel
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I say buy the parcel of land at the bottom of the 100ft dropoff and set up an auto wrecking yard. Put up sign half way down - "Welcome to Crackpot Auto Wrecking"
This is fairly local to me. This is out in the wilds where the decent A road takes the long way round. The problem seems to be that untarmaced roads are set to about 10mph average spped by default in a lot of routing software, and most people select 'fastest route'. Simply by setting untarmaced roads to 1mph you can avoid some of this silly routing. Plus using a bit of common sense.
Here in the US it's called "crackhouse" not "crackpot".
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
My system just told me I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque!
The point of this story is people blindly placing their trust in technology. People seem to have this strange idea that computers are infallible and anything that a computer tells them is always going to magically be 100% accurate.
They don't think for themselves any more, they never question the almighty computer. They throw away their pencil and paper, and rely entirely on their computer. And if the computer is wrong or not available these people may lead themselves right in to disaster. And the potential for this happening is increasing every day.
Hmmm always have to wonder about a place named crackpot, anyway this is actually a common problem with in car navigation, I have had my navigation system try to send me on an impossible route, i.e. roads blocked moved construction...
I would trade my navigation system for Night Vision display in the dash any day.
In Soviet Crackpot, GPS drives you!
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
"is people blindly placing their trust in technology"
:-p
What... you believe what the website said?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Since most navigation companies buy their map databases from someone else they'll have to pass the info on to their supplier and maybe make a tweak to their local copy. It might be as simple as classifying the road as "dirt" vs "county road" to keep it from being used as part of a route.
However, that will only fix things for the people who get the next version of the updated maps. Customers driving around with 4 year old maps in their built-in navigation systems will still be SOL.
So, as someone suggested, a sign is the best and quickest solution. Even the quickest response by all the various Nav system manufacturers and map data suppliers won't fix un-updated systems in the field.
Hey, it leads you to your target... Your wife would have led you to the nearest shoeshop...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I was on a business trip, and we were in a rental with one of those navigation systems, and it had us turn off the main road, make a U shaped diversion and then turn back onto the main road. We just laughed. Ah technology.
... needs to teach the driving directions software about ferries.
I don't know . . . I had some consistantly bad experiences on the 520 when I've left work in Redmond heading for warehouse district. What you say is totally true, but I've never found it any faster. We probably travel different times of the day though, so, yeah, you know.
And damn, mode my OP down . . . I just took an already lame joke and totally drove it into the ground explaining it. Sad.
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One of the things I enjoy about my GPS is that it sometimes takes me on rocky, dangerous, fall-off-a-cliff dirt roads that I'd otherwise never find!
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Looking for a slice of paradise,
but end up at blue balls.
Incidently the name comes from the norse "pot" meaning hole or dip (in this case referring to the limestone rift there) and "Kraka" meaning crow. As a kid I was always told it was because they found some roman coins in a cracked pot there but I think the former is more plausible!
Anyway it was great to see Crackpot on Slashdot. I suppose next week they'll be a story about the nearby town of Hawes (which is pronounced "whores" :-)
3) Let crack dealers open up a camp at the beginning of the road.
If you're not smart enough to read a map and realize you probably shouldn't go down roads with big boulders and cliffs then don't blame it on a GPS... It's 100% user error.
I routinely use GPS waypoint tracking while I'm fishing and 4X4ing.
I then import that data into Google Earth/KML.
Only once have I ever ended up with a KML file I'd actually give someone to use for fishing.
Normally, I end up with results worthy of usage for getting rid of your enemies.
Oh sure... Just go down that goat track for fifteen clicks and then turn left at the old stump.
Trust me, it's totally safe! The GPS knows exactly where you are!
HA!
A looong time ago in Seatle I managed to get some similar system.
Hertz or herts or something car rental came with a navigation system.
I thought, well this is nifty and set about setting up my destination.
It was a bit of a pain initially and I was really annoyed I didn't have more time to spend truly learning it before I actually went somewhere. Still, I pressed onward with this great technological advancement and started on my way.
I swear the damn thing tried to kill me repeatedly.
Wrong street here, one way there or just it generally shouting at me that I was going the wrong way.
I was still fairly impressed that it managed to re-calculate the route, but I gave up on it after the second time it sent me down the wrong way on a one way street.
It ended up being useful to get me close to my destination, but just wasn't responsive enough for my needs.
I'm sure it is much better now though.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Coincidentally, 97.5% of those misdirected thought Blair was wrong on Iraq and 98.6% thought British Intelligence was incompetent.
As I recall, I chose that car company because it was conveniently located close to the ferry dock. Their car was on the way out of the country in 30 minutes.
(Canada is still another country, right?)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I guess it's that pale-white track on the bottom left, just below the "Summer Lodge [Farm]" that was mentioned in the article, in which case no GPS system should take you down one of those - white on British OS maps (as opposed to yellow) means no tarmac. And the dotted edges of the road indeed mean "unfenced". Lovely stuff. It's even debatable whether the narrow yellow roads on that map (which mean single-track with passing places) should be used by a GPS as through routes, let alone the white ones!
Still, it reinforces the stupidity of the drivers, as there's obviously a point there, just past the farm, where the character of the road changes, and they blindly believe the GPS rather than turn back and let it find another route.
I believe this is why most GPS in car nav systems have a click through disclaimer every time it starts saying that while these are valid directiosn they are not necessarily the best/fastest/safest way from A -> B and that you use them at your own peril.
This is what happens when people rely too much on nifty gadgets and stop using basic skills like map reading. The map may sill take you down this road but from what I've seen people get all googlyeyed in front of any video display and lose basic reasoning skill, like that which would prompt somoene to fidgit with the GPS for a minute and find an alternate route as this one seems undrivable.
City: Silent Hill, Toluca County, West Virginia.
Hey, what's that cliff doing in the middle of the roaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA
to gather that the drivers didn't enter Crackpot as a destination. The navigation system directed them *through* it to get to their intended destination.
I have owned a Magellen Roadmate 760 for six months. Living in Chicagoland for 28 years I find my GPS makes days out more flexible; any new place we wish to go is its command. In the past, going from one area to another would include at least a slght bit of driving towards home till we found a street we know takes us to the new area. With GPS it is almost like a wormhole, as soon after you leave your starting point you are in unfamiliar territory and then sooner than you would think you pop out at your destination. I have learned more about what this area has to offer.
"The couple want to see the track removed from the route recommended by satellite navigation systems for travelling between Swaledale and Wensleydale."
You live in Lynnwood? And admit it? Sad.
Oh, and should someone give you it as a gift, you can translate their generosity into the words, "Go get lost!"
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
In Dec 2004 in Tokyo my taxi driver in picked me up after the limo bus dropped me off at some Hyatt Grand or similar (I can't remember the name anymore) and turned on his GPS system. I was blown away.
This think had 3D/elevation-like views. As he got closer to my destination (a hostel only about 10 minutes walk from the big hotel where the limo bus deposited me), he couldn't find the little alleyway between two narrow but longer streets. He went round and round like 4 or 5 times trying to nail the address. I didn't care. Why?
Well, as we travelled the main streets and turned here and there, his GPS system showed the (I think Tokyo Tower and some other) tall buildings. As we ambled round and up and round the block, these building's orientations changed and the 3-D wireframe gave us the feel of being a slow-moving bird going between mountain peaks (of structures). To me that just absolutely blows the doors off ANYthing I've seen US companies bragging about and the stuff selling for $800 that often is a database of sites and just red and blue lines on a yellow page.
Has anyone else seen in the US anything like the 3-D navigation in Japan? Of course, maybe they need it MORE over there with the buildings and addresses being as dense as they are. But, in SF, NYC and other similar places, I could see it being useful here, too.
In the end, it turned out that he'd been passing the hostel each time. We went RIGHT by the door. The building had only been there 2 years, but the street was there longer than that.
But, for other GPS uses, check this out:
http://gpss.tripoduk.com/asilinks.htm
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
As a driver you should never drive where (s)he can't see or at speeds that are uncontrollable. What if there's backed up traffic/accident? What if the road has been washed away or a kid is playing in the road?
Anyone killed by a GPS nav giving them guidance over a cliff deserves what they get. This is Darwinian selection at work (or if you believe God speaks to you via GPS, then it is ID).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
foo bar baz!
A 100 foot drop-off will definitely take a toll on your car if you go over.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You know, left is good too...
Oh, thats nothing... In Autralia, when your inland more than 100Kms, most GPS systems don't show whole towns or roads! not to mention the old 'take this road for 200Kms then this road for 50Kms' when a different road would get you there with almost 100Kms less.. :)
And cliffs & mountains are optional
It gets worse -- it is now up to:
+4 Funny, but Insightful?!
It still sends you the wrong places though. Once I was running late for something, so I decided to just trust it. In that one 5 mile journey it tried to send me down a one-way street the wrong way as well as two roads that had been permamently closed to through-traffic. The maps are at least five years out of date.
And the taxi driver didn't care either. Never earned a fare that easily...
I hope for you that this was on company expense, not out of your pockets ;-)
In the end, it turned out that he'd been passing the hostel each time.
Hehe. Now I know what I'll do when my employers fires me. I'll move to Tokyo and be a taxi driver, bedazzling the naive tourists and business travelers with my snazzy GPS... ;-)
And you think this is somehow a new thing? People rarely question authority figures. Witness the Milgram Experiment which found that 65% of people will inflict fatal electric shocks as punishment when told to do so by an authority figure. That's right, 65% of us are Lyndie England wannabes, given the right circumstances. People are very malleable and easy to lead.
Computers take this to a new level of (misguided) trust.
satellite navigation is obviously just an aid in both cars and boats. there's been a lot more accidents at sea because people trust their GPS navigation blindly, not realizing the maps are still as old as the 19th century in some places (atleast in swedish waters) and believing that the accurancy is way better than with good old fashioned navigation techniques.
...blindly follows everything his/her satnav says?? Surely one of
these dumbf*cks must've noticed that there were on a boulder strewn
cliff road and just perhaps a lonely braincell might've fired up briefly and
thought "hey , this can't be right can it?". I mean really , if the thing
had directed them off the cliff would they have just obeyed? I'm wondering
whose more of a robot , the satnav or the driver.
I smell a Darwin Award...
you saved me the bother of saying it. All GPS units have warnings about exactly this too, in the style of "This is not a replacement for watching the road, dumbass".
I say let the imbeciles (PHBs, Salesdroids, White Van Men) get stuck and/or fall off the cliff. The gene pool needs less of such potential donors.
Somebody should tell them about Microsoft. Then they would quickly stop believing that computers are 100% right. Maybe, this satnav is actually running WinCE, who knows?
The thing that these news stories seem to ignore is that, on every satnav I have ever used, if you take a different route than it specifies, the system automatically recalculates a new route to your destination, and updates its directions accordingly. A driver could easily turn around once they realized that the satnav was leading them on an unpaved road, and wouldn't even be inconvenienced by having to manually reprogram their route.
Sent from my iPhone
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Two words: Darwin Awards.
Somebody please put a webcam on the most dangerous part of this road and put it online. You will get tons of hits and provide a good source of entertainment for the web masses.
Meh.
You don't need a GPS to end up on the road to Crackpot. My wife and I were once led to that road by a low-tech AA atlas. Of course, we really went that way because we couldn't resist seeing a place called "Crackpot", but the map's rendering of that nasty road didn't make it appear any worse than others we'd happily navigated while exploring other Yorkshire backcountry. By the way, once you start down that road, turning around is not an option.
In Alaska, my unit's map was off by 200 feet in some places. It knew where I was, just not where the road was -- It looked like I was going 60 MPH through the woods or water on either side of the road.
The moral of the story is that GPS is a navigational aid, and not a substitute for actual navigation skills. There's more than one sailor who's lost his boat because his GPS told him he was far away from the rocks; it comes as no surprise there are drivers losing their cars for the same reasons.
This is not my sandwich.
Me and some friends from college had reunion in upstate new york. Anyone who used directions from mapquest or googlemaps (rather than from the host) ended up at a fence on the edge of a field. According to mapquest and google the road continued on to the house on the other side of the field. The friend whose house we were going to said that there used to be a road there, but that it had gone out of use long ago. Is this a case of a no longer existing road still being on the county records (or wherever they are kept)? Is this something that happens on occasion when using these technologies?
This is a good way of weeding out the stupid people who will blindly do what their satellite navigation system tells them to do.
It's a shame the vehicles have to suffer, though.
Brings to mind a Simpsons episode: "There. We're here. Now let us never speak of the shortcut again."
I'm living in Denmark, and last summer we went out to a farm - being a farm, it's of course in the middle of nowhere. So I followed the GPS which sent me down worse and worse roads (grass as tall as the car at one point!) until we got to the farm only to be told that there is a main road not 100m from the track I was sent down.
;-)
Then the farm owner told me that the previous winter he had an insurance guy come out to him, again following his GPS, except he was following it a little too closely and ended up driving into a huge pile of snow the farmer had just moved off this little track so he could get out! He had to walk to the farm and get the farmer to pull his car out
Maybe people should take a good look out of the window when driving - that way they might not end up down the side of a hill or in a huge snowdrift!
My GPS put me down the wrong way on a one-way road once. Screech, into the parking lot to turn around. But I needed the wake-up call to not trust the damned thing implicitly. I love it when it disagrees with me and says, "Make U-turn immediately, if possible." Mine has a vaguely Asian female voice. I call her "Suni" and she's my girlfriend. We have a dialogue in the car. My wife doesn't like it.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The "problem" would seem to be insufficient vetting for automated cartographic methods. AFAIK, modern road maps are made from a combination of radar, ultraviolet, and various other spectrum images. Aparantly the bare roads stand right out when you use the right filters.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Honey, I couldn't believe that the GPS took me down that sharp ravine filled with low branches and sharp rocks. Lucky for me there was a tire and body paint shop at the end of the road with a special sale going on!
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
If they were watching the road instead of their GPS screen, they wouldn't have to worry about it!
Actually, if I remember correctly/correct, the fare was under Y900, or about $8.50 or $9.10 that night. It would have been more if the confusion weren't his fault. They have TONS of taxi drivers and cabs, and this poor guy must've been there for the first time. The horrible congestion at certain times of the day or night is the killer on the fare. Going round the block was fast since it was a small block.
But, yeh, IF you can learn the language, get a license, and fit in, you just might be able to become a taxi driver there. Sure it'll be MUCH tougher than say an expat/foreigner moving to the US or the UK or similar places (I assuming I'm leaping a bit in this statement/sentence...)
But, true, too, being dazzled by the GPS (which I forgot to mention, I think did have up and down road elevation, not just the bird's-eye-view). And, being dazzled more than made up for the fare, or any extra I might have paid.
But, you have to consider this: Japan is not NEARLY as domestically concerned about external terrorism as is the US. All major countries invite the wrath of SOMEbody out there, but to date, since the subway gassing in Tokyo (I think I went through that station a couple times, and in most of them they removed ALL the trash cans, but you CAN buy food; you dispose of your coffee cup in a special cup receiver that I think gives you back 5 yen for not littering), but in the US, anything with kick-ass resolution is banned to the normal public.
Makes me wonder...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've got the TomTom Go 300 and a sample of its 3D view is available here and in night mode here- sure it doesn't include wireframe buildings like the one you saw (which would be cool) but for £300 ($500) I can't complain. The GPS device you saw also probably only have buildings for Tokyo only - anything outside Tokyo wouldn't have it probably.