Slashdot Mirror
Australian Police Warn That Apple Maps Could Get Someone Killed
First time accepted submitter jsherring writes "Police in Victoria, Australia warn that Apple's glitch-filled Maps app could get someone killed, after motorists looking for the Victorian city of Mildura were instead guided to a wilderness area. Relying on Apple Maps to navigate through rural Australia seems rather foolish but it has become common practice to rely on GPS navigation. Besides reverting to google maps, perhaps Apple should provide strong warnings to use other navigation sources if navigating to remote locations."
iLost? *ducks*
Apple would be leading us out of the wilderness, not into it!
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area? Well Apple maps just takes you through a different national park and dumps you there. 45C is also 113F. And there is no phone reception or water. And people have already been stuck for 24 hours
If you are trying to get to a residential area, and instead take a dirt road into a wilderness area, while blindly following your GPS, and you get eaten by a crocodile, you deserve the Darwin award you're about to get.
The problem is that in Australia you sometimes do have to take dirt roads through wildnerness areas to get to residential areas. Sometimes for hundreds of kilometres.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps [google.com] See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area? Well Apple maps just takes you through a different national park and dumps you there. 45C is also 113F. And there is no phone reception or water.
Personally I haven't driven in Australia at all - I've only been there once. However, even as an ignorant Pom I'd assume that, when venturing outside of a city, its the sort of place where you take carrying water and emergency gear, keeping your car maintained, carrying reputable maps and planning your journey carefully rather seriously.
Methinks someone who takes the attitude "Its 1000 miles to Wongamonga, we've got half a tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it's dark, we're wearing sunglasses and we've got GPS - hit it!" is an accident waiting to happen.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Methinks someone who takes the attitude "Its 1000 miles to Wongamonga, we've got half a tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it's dark, we're wearing sunglasses and we've got GPS - hit it!" is an accident waiting to happen.
You clearly haven't driven in Australia ... that would be 1,600 kilometres, you wouldn't leave with only half a pack of cigarettes and where's the booze?
. But isn't it silly to drive these distances through the wilderness
You're not quite getting it. It's not 'wilderness' as such, it's 'ordinary' distances in 'ordinary' rural Australia. 500km gets me half the way across Queensland and I've done double that (driving 900km from Mt Isa to Townsville) on a regular basis without any concern.
Concerns are limited because:
- You usually go about 100-150 kilometers before the next fuel stop.
- Roads have a reasonable amount of traffic (30-100 vehicles an hour).
- Towns are normally where the GPS tells you they are.
And that's the problem, because if the map you've got is a little vague and that town isn't there, then the rough "I can make it there with 1/4 tank to spare" calculation doesn't get you back that 100km to the previous town where you should have filled up and it doesn't get you to the next town either.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Don't worry, Bazza's place is on the way to Wongamonga so we can pick up some booze there.
Apple Maps sucks. There is no two ways about it, and Apple certainly deserves stick for it.
I have also never been to Australia, but I am capable of making a couple of observations:
If you're driving to a location you don't know, in an environment where getting lost could get you killed:
1. NEVER rely on one source of information for getting you to your destination. I wouldn't rely solely on Google Maps to get there either, even though Google Maps have been accurate and reliable for me in the past. Check Google Maps and a good old fashioned map before leaving. After all, what happens if you you lose reception or battery half way there?
2. Make sure you bring basic survival gear for your environment; in my home area that would be water, food, very warm clothes, blankets, a spade, a torch and
considerably more petrol than you think you need.
The root cause of this, and many of the other errors in city location observed throughout Australia, is actually quite simple and I don't know why Apple haven't fixed it yet. It was a bit of a facepalm moment when I realised what was actually going on with the Australian maps on iOS6.
Basically there are two problems:
1. Apple Maps is marking the centre of local government areas (analogous to a county, for American readers) as a point location, rather than a name for a large area of land (i.e. it's treating them as locations you can navigate to); and
2. In the case that a search query matches both a local government area name, AND a town name ... it preferences the local government area (which as mentioned, is being mapped as an exact point roughly in the middle of the area, generally in the middle of nowhere)
For example, follow the Hume Highway south from Sydney a little way and you will see a point marked as Wingecaribee, east of the highway, roughly in the vicinity of where the town of Moss Vale is (though, as noted, the GUI chooses to display Wingecaribee prominently, but doesn't mark Moss Vale or any other towns at all, unless you zoom in really close). The point marked as Wingecaribee is just a random spot in rugged forested terrain. Nothing's actually there. This is simply the centre of the Wingecaribee Shire. But there is no actual town called Wingecaribee so apart from looking weird, this doesn't hurt anything.
BUT ... keep following the highway south and you will soon come to the next shire, Goulburn Shire. Again, the centre of this local government area is marked as a point, called "Goulburn" and again, it's not anywhere near anything. It's in the middle of some random farmer's field somewhere. BUT THIS TIME, we have a problem, because within Goulburn Shire, there is actually also a town called Goulburn. But if you search for 'Goulburn', you are directed to the centre of the Goulburn Shire, NOT the town. This is completely retarded, as noone ever searches for things by local government area name in Australia (many people don't even know the name of their LGA ... they aren't as prominently known as counties in the US), and even if they did, wouldn't want to be directed to some arbitrary point near the middle of it with no regard for whether there's anything there.
This is what has happened in TFA too. There is a Mildura local government area. Within that, there is also a city called Mildura. But the city isn't marked; only the centre of the LGA. Which as stated, is in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Basically whoever processed the Australian mapping data has interpreted LGA (shire, county etc.) names as locality (town, city) names. And has given them prominence in both display and search results over actual localities. Should be simple to fix, surely. The data is there - it's just being used incorrectly.
I live in Perth (the capital of Western Australia not the UK one) I'm 20 minutes drive from the city centre, 15 minutes drive to wonderful beaches, and 10 minutes drives in several directions to bushland remote enough that if I had a heart attack while walking they would never find the body. Australia is a big empty place, your biggest dangers (apart from hitting a roo, or dozing off and driving into oncoming road trains (single lane 110kmph YAY)) is not making it to the next petrol station. Its ok in urban areas, but as soon as you leave metro... better make sure you know your fuel efficiency. But if you do stray off a main road, even by accident, its not like there is any space to turn around. Up in shark bay we pulled off onto a beach carpark and went down a sudden incline over the shells. No way to turn back and the only way was forward and hope the loop put you back somewhere else. Long story short sedan started to bottom out so we lost our nerve and tried to turn around. Big mistake, soon as we left the compressed trail we sank to the chassis at all 4 wheels. No reception, had hike through the bush back to the main road to hail a tourist bus to get the townsite to send out a truck to pull us out.
This happened only last month when two guys working on a station got their 4WD bogged 10 miles from the homestead and tried to walk back under the hot sun. One of them died from heat and dehydration.
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much..
Not really different for Canada, every year we get hundreds of people who are sent off into logging roads, or CO-Access roads. Basically no maintenance at all, and not traveled by anything but snowmobiles in the winter. Where there is no phone service, no water except from the snow, and no food for a few hundred KM or more. And on some days it'll hit a frosty -30C. This has happened all over the place here in Canada, and the police have put out numerous warnings to not trust your GPS at all. While Australia has 45C temperatures, you can survive that for a few days, if you're lucky. Here when it hits -30C you might have 5-6 hours if you're not dressed for it. Especially if the snowmobile patrols are already out hunting for someone else.
Then again this has happened quite a bit in the US too. Where people have been dumped in the middle of death valley as a "shortcut" and only by pure luck they didn't die.
Om, nomnomnom...
Its exactly this.
The Apple apologists are suggesting that you shouldn't trust a map application, but should somehow magically trust other map sources.
The flaw in this thinking is that if a popular mapping company was selling paper maps at local gas stations that sent you in the wrong direction into the middle of nowhere, then we would also expect a government office to come forth and announce the serious risks associated with trusting that particular paper map.
On top of this, the iPhone maps are now different than the one they used to provide.. the old one was of much better quality. So a person may have come to trust the maps built into their iPhone because they were of good quality, but now suddenly they arent of good quality even though its the same damn iPhone. That "upgrade" was actually a full-blown downgrade.
So yes, we expect the government to announce the risks associated with trusting Apple's maps, because not only are they no longer good maps, Apple after the fact went and edited everyones existing maps to be of much worse quality.
"His name was James Damore."
Isn't Darwin further up north?
not according to Apple
---
Australia is ~99% the area of the lower 48 of the US - i.e. essentially the same size. Very convenient comparison when Americans ask you how big Australia is. Often they seem surprised for some reason though. I suspect it might have something to do with the way Mercator projection exaggerates the areas of places as you get further poleward (the US is significantly further north than Australia is south).
The US is 'wider' east to west, but Australia is quite a bit 'taller', north to south (especially if you include Tasmania).
What is amazing, is that people will follow the turn by turn indication of a GPS unit in priority of any road indication or even indication given by a local.
I had to argue with a friend to take a direct road to the highway, he wouldn't. He didn't even follow my car, or even the big green sign that indicate the highway: at some point he decided to turn in the direction the GPS told him to. What's wrong people: I was doing that road several time a day every day and my wife has been living there for more than 30 years. What are the fucking chances that the GPS knows better ?
GPS have transformed people into lemmings.
"Well Apple maps just takes you through a different national park and dumps you there. 45C is also 113F. And there is no phone reception or water."
Think of it as evolution in action.
Mid-2011, I was driving through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado along a road that would around the outside of a canyon. My GPS told me to take a right turn onto "Route 82d." You know what was off to my right? Nothing. A steep degrade, through a bunch of trees, and ending up in the canyon maybe 50 feet down.
I was so shocked by it that I turned around, drove the route again, and captured it with my phone: link
Bottom line: Don't blindly trust your GPS.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Oh yeah, Siri should just come on every 5 minutes while navigating and say "Just to let you know, I have no idea where I'm going."
Hasn't the head of the Apple Maps team has already been taken 'outback'?
You don't know how to use the shells?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.