[N/A] Children of the Car GPS

It's happened to me. Not me personally, a coworker from a regional office came up for an off site meeting. Afterwards, I told her "follow me" to get back to the office. Meaning, don't follow the GPS. Well she did follow the GPS, and attempted to exit to the left on a freeway on ramp that was now on the right as of that week. The signs were there. I was there. But noooooo.

45 minutes later after I got back, she got a well deserved ribbing from the entire office when she arrived.
 
My kids are terrible about using GPS to go anywhere!! My youngest, the pilot, goes to UGA in Athens, he has driven back and forth 50-75 times over 3 years and he still uses his GPS and can't take alternate routes that I tell him to avoid traffic!! Scary thing is that he flies fine without the GPS in the airplane!!
 
N747JB said:
My kids are terrible about using GPS to go anywhere!! My youngest, the pilot, goes to UGA in Athens, he has driven back and forth 50-75 times over 3 years and he still uses his GPS and can't take alternate routes that I tell him to avoid traffic!! Scary thing is that he flies fine without the GPS in the airplane!!
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I like using waze because it will let me know traffic is coming, and if there are cops out. I use the GPS more than I need to while driving, but mostly to get me there faster. I usually know the route without it.
 
N747JB said:
My kids are terrible about using GPS to go anywhere!! My youngest, the pilot, goes to UGA in Athens, he has driven back and forth 50-75 times over 3 years and he still uses his GPS and can't take alternate routes that I tell him to avoid traffic!! Scary thing is that he flies fine without the GPS in the airplane!!
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I've been training my kid to direct me to various familiar places, as he's almost old enough to need to do that on his own.

One of the cars has a navigation system built in. His first reaction to "OK, get us home" was to dive into it. He learned pretty quickly not to put all his faith in one device that he wasn't proficient on. We also keep paper road maps in the car, and memory is also an option; as a teenager, I don't think he'll be doing remote road trips out of the area, so this is all in familiar territory.
 
I was raised in the days of paper maps, but also was an early adopter of GPS in the car. I remember many a wild goose chase back in the day, especially when navigating to POIs. Back then, I'd estimate that as many as three-quarters of the POIs were wrong, or even non-existent.

They've improved a lot since then, but many GPS devices still have a really hard time with jug handles, traffic circles, railroad and utility rights-of-way, seasonal motor vehicle trails, and as we see from this example, boat ramps. A lot of things that aren't really "roads" are considered as such by GPS machines.

For example, I've had a bunch of GPS devices attempt to navigate me over this lovely road:

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The problem, aside from it being a one-lane dirt trail, is that it's not even really a road. Technically, it's a "Seasonal Motor Vehicle Trail," which means that it's not maintained at all and isn't plowed or salted during the winter. It's really intended more for ATVs than for cars. Drivers of cars are free to use it -- at their own rather substantial risk, especially in bad weather -- but it's really not recommended.

This lovely trail can be avoided by taking an actual road that more-or-less parallels it on the other side of the mountain. It adds roughly 0.4 miles to the trip but is a lot faster and safer. But up until very recently, every device I ever used considered it the fastest, as well as the shortest route. If a driver knew better, he or she would ignore the instruction to turn onto the trail, drive 0.4 miles on the road they were already on, and be routed over the better road. But if they didn't know (which is why most people use GPS, after all), they wound up on the trail.

TomTom recently changed its classification for that road from an "unpaved secondary road" to an "unpaved local road," which solved the problem for TomTom-based device users. The algorithm sufficiently favors "secondary" roads over "local" roads that it shifts the route to the better road. I'm not sure whether Navteq, OSM, or Google have also updated their maps. I probably should check OSM. I've recently signed up as a volunteer, so I can submit the change myself.

The reason this is a really bad situation is not only because the trail is treacherous (especially in the rain or snow), but also because it's sparsely-traveled and is in a cell phone dead zone. A traveler who runs off the road (assuming that they survive the fall -- the escarpment is quite high and nearly-vertical at a few points) may spend days there before anyone notices them.

It's easy to say, especially as pilots, that the drivers should have been more situationally aware. But I'd cut some slack to any out-of-town driver who found himself or herself on this trail at night or in bad weather. Even the rednecks avoid this one. It's a pretty dangerous trail.

As for the boat ramp... well, if it was that foggy that she couldn't tell that she was on a boat ramp, maybe she shouldn't have been driving at all. Get-there-itis isn't limited to aviation.

Rich
 
I've had a small Garmin car GPS for a long time. I always kept it updated, but also learned to never trust it in rural Colorado where my folks live. It can guide you into some rough back roads, so I got used to hearing "recalculating..." a lot when I'd bypass them. I just upgraded to a higher end Garmin with a traffic receiver. I gave it a good workout on a long trip this weekend. The traffic part is interesting. You'll get a voice saying something like: "Traffic ahead will add xx minutes to your route. I have found a different route that will save yy minutes. Would you like to re-route?" Once, I was ready to give it a try, and just before I touched "yes", it said, "Traffic is now flowing normally along your route."
 
Somedudeintn said:
I like using waze because it will let me know traffic is coming, and if there are cops out. I use the GPS more than I need to while driving, but mostly to get me there faster. I usually know the route without it.
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I also use Waze on my commute. It's not as useful out here as it's been in large cities, but it still works.

I still notice errors every few months navigating to a POI. Normally it is because who ever added the POI to Waze got the location wrong.

I have been that person to blindly follow the GPS before. One time I ended up on a backwoods road that had quite a few one lane ancient wood bridges.
 
I always argue with my auto GPS. I call her "Sammie".

Usually I plan a trip with the GPS route planning feature, then look at the paper map to make sure the GPS knows where it is going. Then I by pass some of the needless turns or other routing that is not needed on the route.

I try to stay off interstates as much as I can. When I drove from New Mexico to Juneau, AK, my GPS gave me some options on where to catch the ferry. It showed the road up to the ramp to drive on the ferry, and showed the approximate route and time on the water that the ferry would travel. And if updated before a trip, it will show current locations and type of restaurants, hotels and gas stations on the route, even through small towns in Canada.

I use my car GPS a lot when traveling. I can remember the time before GPS and I eventually found where I needed to go, but I won't travel without one now.
 
GPS in the car for long trips? I think that violates man law about 20 different ways. It's on the level of stopping to ask directions.
GPS is useful for finding a specific address and might be acceptable under the efficiency exception to man law.
 
I used it on my long trip for finding addresses when we were meeting family.

On the interstate I set it to keep a running list of "nearest" rest stops. It adds to the excitement. "Hmmm, next rest stop in 20 minutes, next one after that in an hour. Do I risk it or not? Do I feel lucky?"
 
Clark1961 said:
GPS in the car for long trips? I think that violates man law about 20 different ways. It's on the level of stopping to ask directions.
GPS is useful for finding a specific address and might be acceptable under the efficiency exception to man law.
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Well, at least it's company when you're driving alone.

Rich
 
It's a love/hate relationship.

Kinda like almost everything else in this life.

I sure wasn't pleased when GPS put me off into one of the ward's in Houston. I realized where we were headed and did a 180 straight back pronto. No messing around. Like flying towards a dark badass anvil head moving your direction. Reverse course!
 
One of my cousins got married at a winery in the Sierra Nevada foothills. When driving from their recommended hotel to the wedding site, my GPS took me on a back road that wasn't quite matching its expectations as to where the road was and what turns to take, so I bailed, back-tracked, and took a longer more traveled route. When I got to the wedding site, I learned that many of the guests had had the same problem, and also that even if I had managed to find the intended route, it led to a locked gate!
 
Palmpilot said:
One of my cousins got married at a winery in the Sierra Nevada foothills. When driving from their recommended hotel to the wedding site, my GPS took me on a back road that wasn't quite matching its expectations as to where the road was and what turns to take, so I bailed, back-tracked, and took a longer more traveled route. When I got to the wedding site, I learned that many of the guests had had the same problem, and also that even if I had managed to find the intended route, it led to a locked gate!
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My test for automotive GPS's and other road navigators used to be to get directions to my house. Almost all of them would command a right turn off a bridge. To this date, every one still directs through a locked gate on a one-lane mountainous road with difficult turn-arounds even for small cars. And people wonder why I think Google self-driving cars are a bad idea....
 
MAKG1 said:
My test for automotive GPS's and other road navigators used to be to get directions to my house. Almost all of them would command a right turn off a bridge. To this date, every one still directs through a locked gate on a one-lane mountainous road with difficult turn-arounds even for small cars. And people wonder why I think Google self-driving cars are a bad idea....
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I share your skepticism!
 
Wife and I drove to Gatlinburg one spring with a TomTom in the car. She plugged in the destination and the route it showed was different and less time then we normally took. We decided to follow it, but when it took us off the interstate too far from our destination I knew it was wrong. We were not in a hurry so followed the red line. Started on a decent state road, turned into a narrow country road and then an almost one lane country road. Next was a church parking lot, around the church and straight into Douglas lake. The red line went across the lake and joined the interstate we had left. I told her Tommy must know they are going to build a bridge there someday and we will just have to wait on it. To this day she does not trust the gps, always uses the map. We had a gps in our plane which was great, but she always followed along with the chart and looked for landmarks.
 
My reaction to automotive GPS horror stories is "That's what you get for accepting the defaults." My Garmin 2460 gives me a list of "Avoidances" and I just have to check the box next to the kind of road I want to avoid.

Bob Gardner
 
bobmrg said:
My reaction to automotive GPS horror stories is "That's what you get for accepting the defaults." My Garmin 2460 gives me a list of "Avoidances" and I just have to check the box next to the kind of road I want to avoid.

Bob Gardner
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I missed the "avoid driving off bridges" setting.
 
My new Garmin also has area avoidances. I haven't used it yet but it looks like you can designate a road by selecting end points and you can avoid a whole area by drawing a rectangle.
 
Somedudeintn said:
I like using waze because it will let me know traffic is coming, and if there are cops out. I use the GPS more than I need to while driving, but mostly to get me there faster. I usually know the route without it.
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I've also developed a Waze habit for the "additional" information it can use. Traffic, construction zones, etc.

I also kinda like that the community can update it. I've fixed a couple of rural road intersections out here near the house, including one that's fenced off that it used to think was open. The online editor is pretty nifty, and their "trust" model lets anyone edit, but only higher level folks to approve changes.

Over time their maps just get better. And it's free.

Installed two lovely Kenwood/Garmin stereos in two of the trucks. Liked it. Has traffic. But doesn't have all the other stuff Waze has. And wasn't clear that unlike some Garmin units with "lifetime maps", these don't. Garmin wants $70/year per vehicle to update the maps.

Guess which two expensive GPS devices in the dash don't get used much anymore and haven't been updated in two years? **** off Garmin. The data is free and the app runs on my phone now. Those dash mounted expensive to update units with less features, are essentially obsolete, unless I forgot my cell phone. I stick the phone in a RAM mount now and plug in a charging cable.

All I use the Garmins for now is fuel mileage. They accurately track miles between full ups, so I just enter price and gallons and done.

bobmrg said:
My reaction to automotive GPS horror stories is "That's what you get for accepting the defaults." My Garmin 2460 gives me a list of "Avoidances" and I just have to check the box next to the kind of road I want to avoid.
Click to expand...

I can't turn any of those on where I live. "Avoid dirt roads", nope. "Avoid seasonal roads," maybe if they've updated the county road from unpaved to paved status. Even "avoid toll roads" is sometimes inappropriate if I need the ten minutes back that using the highest priced toll road per mile in the country will get me, from time to time, on certain routes.

The other Garmin feature of "avoid this road" really sucks on the UI to do when you're not ON that road, I've noticed.

Love those Kenwood in dash gadgets for their music abilities and iOS integration. But the Garmij module could drop dead in them, and I wouldn't miss it. Not at the price Garmin wants for map updates.

Only thing Waze needs to play catch up on against anyone else is depicting multiple lane exits. It needs that feature badly.
 
My wife's great uncle recently paid us a visit. He began his trip from FL using a new GPS unit, but it was routing him along a lot of back roads, some in rough shape. He finally got to a familiar Interstate and ignored the GPS from then on. Turns out he had unwittingly selected a bike route. My wife, lord bless her, cannot navigate without one, unless in very familiar territory. My kids? I don't ever ride with them but they use their phone GPS a lot.
 
How many people do any preplanning? Load up the car, punch the address into the gps, hit the gas. ***** about what it gives you and where it takes you. I've had it take me down deadend roads, one ways, some guys driveway, etc. Sometimes es, it's worth doing a map quest or Google o n your destination and using your own awesome navigation skills. Direct to doesn't always work.
One of the more interesting was in Michigan. From our hotel to the planned restaurant was about a mile so said the gps. The actual route which the hotel told us was a five mile rectangle. Getting back was a bear.
 
denverpilot said:
I've also developed a Waze habit for the "additional" information it can use. Traffic, construction zones, etc.

I also kinda like that the community can update it. I've fixed a couple of rural road intersections out here near the house, including one that's fenced off that it used to think was open. The online editor is pretty nifty, and their "trust" model lets anyone edit, but only higher level folks to approve changes.

Over time their maps just get better. And it's free.

Installed two lovely Kenwood/Garmin stereos in two of the trucks. Liked it. Has traffic. But doesn't have all the other stuff Waze has. And wasn't clear that unlike some Garmin units with "lifetime maps", these don't. Garmin wants $70/year per vehicle to update the maps.

Guess which two expensive GPS devices in the dash don't get used much anymore and haven't been updated in two years? **** off Garmin. The data is free and the app runs on my phone now. Those dash mounted expensive to update units with less features, are essentially obsolete, unless I forgot my cell phone. I stick the phone in a RAM mount now and plug in a charging cable.

All I use the Garmins for now is fuel mileage. They accurately track miles between full ups, so I just enter price and gallons and done.



I can't turn any of those on where I live. "Avoid dirt roads", nope. "Avoid seasonal roads," maybe if they've updated the county road from unpaved to paved status. Even "avoid toll roads" is sometimes inappropriate if I need the ten minutes back that using the highest priced toll road per mile in the country will get me, from time to time, on certain routes.

The other Garmin feature of "avoid this road" really sucks on the UI to do when you're not ON that road, I've noticed.

Love those Kenwood in dash gadgets for their music abilities and iOS integration. But the Garmij module could drop dead in them, and I wouldn't miss it. Not at the price Garmin wants for map updates.

Only thing Waze needs to play catch up on against anyone else is depicting multiple lane exits. It needs that feature badly.
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I found Waze pretty useless, actually (aside from being a bit creepy and sometimes corny). Even once I dismisses the creepiness and the corniness, Waze doesn't download and cache sufficient map data to make a long trip through areas with spotty cell coverage possible, especially when departing from a cell phone dead zone. The routing can then become very bizarre because it bases it on whatever information it happens to have in cache. On one test, it picked a route that would have added more than 135 miles through two states to a 60-mile intrastate trip; and when I ignored its suggestion and took the most direct route, it simply stopped routing.

What I suppose happened was that at the time I entered that destination, the app neither had not was able to download the basemap for the area through which the best route passed; so at that moment in time, it literally didn't even know that that little piece of the world existed. It based its route on what it knew. Apparently Waze limits the cached data to a fifty-mile radius of your starting point and downloads the rest on-the-fly -- assuming that you spend enough time in areas where it has a data connection to complete the downloads. If not, then things get wonky. (It does apparently cache the maps for any place you've been in the past 30 days, however; so if you tend to travel to the same places all the time, probably you won't have any out-of-data issues.)

I doubt that Waze will ever allow for more offline map caching because their entire model is based on data collection, and they don't want to enable users to shut off their data connections and still use the basic navigation app. The amount of data that it collects and send back is staggering; and considering that Waze is owned by Google, I'm sure that data is being monetized somehow beyond the on-screen paid POIs. Without the telemetry, maintaining the app serves no business purpose for them.

In fairness, however, someone has to pay for the service; and frankly, if one want absolute privacy, then one shouldn't use a real-time phone navigation app at all. They should use a freestanding GPS device without telemetry, or a phone app with offline maps stored and live features disabled. Garmin's newer freestanding devices use a one-way traffic data download service from NavTeq that doesn't require a data connection at all, and most phone navigation apps that offer offline maps will function in basic navigation mode with data services disabled. But if one wants real-time traffic, cop locations, and so forth, it's impossible to deliver that data without first collecting it (and, of course, knowing the user's location). You can't have one without the other.

Nonetheless, when the app publisher's restrictions on offline map caching adversely affect the basic design purpose of the app, that's a problem. Many other navigation apps do manage to take a middle course by allowing offline map storage of the whole country, if you care to download and store that much data, to get you through the dead zones; but also live services for when you do have and elect to use a data connection. Waze doesn't offer that option. If you drive through enough dead zones where you haven't been recently enough for the app to have cached that data for you, you're going to have problems.
In addition to the lack of map caching, Waze lane guidance is literally non-existent. Waze also doesn't seem to grasp the concepts of jughandles or traffic circles. But in fairness, very few phone navigation apps do. Sygic and TomTom were the only phone apps I tested that consistently understood the concept of exiting right to make left turns, and knew which turns to take to exit traffic circles and roundabouts (which apparently are two different things, although I have no idea what makes them different).

I suspect that the ability to comprehend jughandles, traffic circles, and roundabouts is basemap-related. Both Sygic and TomTom use TomTom basemaps and are able to negotiate them with no problems. OSM and Google-based apps usually get them wrong. NavTeq appears to understand them, judging by my freestanding Garmin unit; but I didn't test any NavTeq-based mobile apps because Navigon (owned by Garmin) is too expensive and doesn't offer a trial version. It's also possible that the OSM maps do contain that data, but that the apps I tested didn't interpret or implement it well.

All in all, I considered Waze the absolute worst of the navigation apps I tried. Probably in the cities it's better; but out here, I found it worse than useless, especially when departing from locations that didn't have data service. The only two phone navigation apps I've tested so far that I actually like as well as or better than a freestanding unit are Sygic and TomTom's own "Go" app. The rest have varied from "horrible" to "meh." I'm still testing others.

Rich
 
Clark1961 said:
GPS in the car for long trips? I think that violates man law about 20 different ways. It's on the level of stopping to ask directions.
GPS is useful for finding a specific address and might be acceptable under the efficiency exception to man law.
Click to expand...

This may be, but it satisfies the man law requiring the latest fancy gadget to solve a simple problem.
 
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