“Something is happening to us.”
Most death-by-GPS incidents do not involve actual deaths–or even serious injuries. They are accidents or accidental journeys brought about by an uncritical acceptance of turn-by-turn commands: the Japanese tourists in Australia who drove their car into the ocean while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island from the mainland; the man who drove his BMW down a narrow path in a village in Yorkshire, England, and nearly over a cliff; the woman in Bellevue, Washington, who drove her car into a lake that their GPS said was a road; the Swedish couple who asked GPS to guide them to the Mediterranean island of Capri, but instead arrived at the Italian industrial town of Carpi; the elderly woman in Belgium who tried to use GPS to guide her to her home, 90 miles away, but instead drove hundreds of miles to Zagreb, only realizing her mistake when she noticed the street signs were in Croatian.
You, maybe. I won’t own one. .
I’m a trucker that uses one. But it’s just a tool. I still use my phone (google maps) plus paper maps. Blindly following them is a mistake. Hell just pulling into a rest area can change your route.
That’s one reason the U. S. Navy is teaching the traditional methods of navigation once again. Sailors are learning to use sextants for the first time in many years.
If using a GPS alters your spatial and situational awareness to the point where you get into trouble, you’re using it incorrectly. It’s just a much more sophisticated and convenient version of asking someone for directions, particularly if you have no idea how reliable that someone is. Several times in rural France the GPS sent us down almost-invisible roads; my wife and I would just glance at each other and reverse direction until “Betty” (our nickname for the voice) was forced to compute a different route. Other times, even with the famous Michelin guide in the car, if it hadn’t been for the GPS we would’ve never found our destination.
“the elderly woman in Belgium who tried to use GPS to guide her to her home, 90 miles away, but instead drove hundreds of miles to Zagreb, only realizing her mistake when she noticed the street signs were in Croatian.”
She didn’t notice going through other countries? I don’t think you can blame GPS for this one.
A surprising number of GPS mistakes are due to this type of cluelessness. “No other town could possibly have the same name as the one I want to go to! And I’m sure that I spelled it correctly! And I don’t need to review the route suggested by the GPS or pay attention to the distance estimates!”
Duh.
I have a handheld Garmin which I have rarely used. I bought it because it was on sale and I thought I should find out what the fuss is about. I would trust it to tell me my position in longitude and latitude. For route selection and navigation I read a map, and the ground, for direction finding I rely on a compass.
I have a simple hand held GPS that gives lat-lon position, or map grid coordinates and can ‘save’ locations. I use it with a map and compass. It’s just another useful navigation tool. I would never have one built into a vehicle; that’s just another gimmick. To many people think computers are infallible.
I thought it would never happen to me and it did. GPS took me 150km off target to some medieval town/village in the middle of Portugal late night. The narrow cobblestone streets were empty, the modern sedan could barely make turns and for a moment I was under impression that I am travelling in time. Later, on the same night GPS offered me to travel down steep vineyard path, I respectfully declined.
I suspect that all these people involved in these GPS inspired adventures would have been just as lost and clueless pre GPS. Probably more so..
I use a GPS to record where I’ve been. Otherwise it isn’t much use. The GPS was useless the two times I got lost on hiking trails / forest roads on the island. And during the second instance while getting lost my hiking companion tried to use her phone to fix our position. It put us in a subdivision several miles to the north of the mountain we were on. On each occasion the thing that got us unlost was my compass. I never go hiking without it.
I am sure many of them would not have gotten lost before GPS because they would have been aware that they were clueless and therefore properly apprehensive. GPS promises that it doesn’t matter that you don’t know where you are going or how to get there, GPS knows and you just have to do as it tells you.
I repeat- My GPS lets me know which traffic lights are photo enforced.
In Wilmington NC I probably saved 100 dollars because I stopped when her British voice tells me.
Those that went through on yellow probably received their tickets in the mail..
You can now add this to your bucket of protection..
http://www.photoenforced.com/
Damn- I just noticed that France looks like a Michelin Junk Yard..
http://www.photoenforced.com/
I won’t and don’t use one. I might if I still had my boat but even then good maps, charts and the ability to read them was more than adequate.
I have never used one in North America, but after a trip to the UK, I decided to make an exception. Driving in England during the summer brings a certain challenge in driving on the opposite side of the road. It is also quite common for signage to be inadequate or confusing, and there is that annoying British habit of changing the name of streets or roads seemingly randomly without warning.The major problem, however, was that lush foliage obscured (and sometimes completely covered) the road signs that might have proven useful. A friend lent me her Garmin, and, along with my map, I saved several hours over the trip.
I use mine on my seasonal trips from Arizona to Saskatchewan. It warns me to the intersections
on Route 83 through Nebraska, SD, ND. It is very accurate in the City to find an address…
It did want me to go up a dry wash in Apache Junction, AZ
I’ve used them for years. They’re like any tool, you have to be selective.
They are great in unfamiliar urban situations and not so good on back roads.
I drive a large motorhome and I find I need to be careful that I’m not forced to have to extract myself from foolish situations that could have been avoided with a little forethought.
Just as its not advisable to use the scope on a rifle as binoculars, one should have a backup resource.
I guess it all boils down to personality and preference.
And, can’t you just wait for the first driverless car “accident” where the passenger inputs his destination and then lays down for a nap…I know I am on pins and needles waiting for that one.
Exactly. We use ours a lot on trips and with caution for basic search for addresses in the cities. However, they can not be fully trusted.
Don’t worry, everyone. I’m sure if we smash all the spinning jennys we can all keep our jobs.
GPSs don’t kill people. Stupidity kills people.
You see,
these knuckleheads want everything done for them. As the trucker said, it is a bloody tool, the user needs to learn how to use it.
It would be also helpful to know yer east, west, north and south. It would be also helpful to know what your general direction is.
If it does not look that your going the right direction it’s probably true.
As you may have noticed there are geniuses aplenty, now if they acquired some common sense, “we all”, to borrow from socialist/communist terminology, could be better off.
Used one for over ten years in search and rescue and like a map and compass it is a tool and as such you must learn how to use it. And therein lies the fault, people today are in such a hurry that they don’t take the time to learn.
I find them useful. Would I rely upon one 100%? No. I figure the geo-location aspect works pretty well. If it can get a satellite fix, it can tell you where you are. But one has to remember that the maps stored in the unit were entered by human operators who wrote the software, or were scanned in from paper maps, and that errors may be present. I think some users don’t realize this, and believe somehow that GPS is a live display of their own vehicle, as seen by a satellite in space.
I much prefer to use paper maps when planning a road trip, or indeed, a journey on foot through the bush. Once having a mental image of the route, the GPS can be useful to chart my progress along it. Also, it is most useful for finding street addresses in large urban areas. And it can be fun to “fool” the GPS by deliberately taking “wrong” turns as opposed to what they suggest, and then watch it recalculate the route based on your updated location.
Maps and GPS complement one another, and the two used together are more useful than either alone.
I have a hand held one, but as emphasized by many above, it is a tool — one of many. Where I find it particularly useful is in orienting direction and returning to a point of origin (hotel) in an unfamiliar environment. It’s a complement to, not a substitute for, a good map and situational awareness.
Just wait for some so called scientist to come up with some phonie study claiming that GPS are throwing off the earths rotation or orbit and some dumber the a sack of wet grass clippings senator introduces some stupid bill to ban GPS all on one fake study by some weirdo who meditates and gets messages from the ghost of king kong
I use a compass,always have, not interested in GPS,even when they’re on sale.
A few years back,an elderly couple from Penticton using a GPS in Washington State, drove up an old logging road and got stuck in the snow.The man left for help and was never seen again.His wife stayed in the vehicle and was found alive two or three weeks later.
She mentioned that they were quite nervous after leaving the highway, but that GPS said THAT was the route to take. Too much faith in technology.
Daniel: not the point. Nobody on this thread seems to be saying “those damn machines will put us all out of work”.
The point: when you want high tech, the best place to look for it is between your ears.
Uh, that was one of the examples offered up in the linked story. The couple got lost in Nevada, not Washington. The problem is more one of ignorance, not misplaced faith. But there are people out there who cannot read a map, too.
I have used them on the road. Have used them in the air. Have used them on the water. An absolutely indispensable tool.
As many have stated above – those who are led off track that easily are probably hopeless with or without one of the greatest inventions of all time: The Global Position System of satellites.
Nothing but nothing is ‘Fool’ proof.
My wife bought one for me. Used it only once. I don’t need two women telling me how to drive.
The GPS issue reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “Now that I have a computer I can make mistreakes ten times faster than I ever could before.”
this reminds me of an experiment conducted when calculators started to take off. the investigators rigged one to make mistakes and let people use it to see if they would question the haywire results. few did, deferring to the omniscient technology instead of their OWN experience and common sense.
all hail the comupter. all hail the comupter.
when I was a mainframe operator in the 70s and 80s it was no end of amusement to see the naive masses claim they never made a mistake. then I would tell them about how the ones I worked with had the capability to LOG the many mistakes that occurred so the engineers could keep on top of things.
then back in the 90s, when that RAM factory in Japan had a fire and prices skyrocketed and the ‘solution’ was to cut costs by dropping the parity bit, ie the ‘9th’ bit that had existed up to that point that would at least show there was something awry in the other 8 bits. the bafflegab techno jargon used to excuse and explain away the change was awesome. and now, RAM bits are so tiny a cosmic ray can ping the electrons off and cause data loss, ie errors, so where are ye now o digital gods?
I think this thread should be titled: “Death By Natural Selection”
Something else to consider: the more expensive ones remember where you’ve been, and they can phone home.
Siri does too.
Fun, eh?
I have one, I use it, and the phone too. I just make sure I don’t drive anywhere “interesting”, know what I mean?
It’s curious, wrt calculators, how few people now have the ability to perform arithmetic in their heads, even for rough approximations. Usually when I utilize a calculator now (mainly out of laziness since I don’t want to spend a minute doing a long mental calculation), I always have a rough idea to better than 1 order of magnitude of the result I’m expecting. Maybe this comes from always carrying a slide rule with me when I was in high school as soon as I’ve gotten the numbers in scientific notation I’ve got an approximate answer. In a calculator making small, deliberate, errors I’d probably also have a hard time finding them unless they were out by an order of magnitude or if an odd number was produced from adding up even numbers only and other glaring errors of this nature existed.
Will have to look up your reference to why parity disappeared from memory. I used to be concerned about this in the late 1990’s when having 128 Mb of RAM on ones computer was considered to be a huge amount. Given that I now have 16 Gb of RAM on my work machine, that’s considerably larger than my first “huge” HDD in 2000, a 2 Gb Maxtor drive which I naively assumed would hold all my digital data for years to come. When one writes enough data to a disk, errors occur and can be glaring. I’ve had a number of surveillance cameras running since 2003 recording an image every 10 seconds (makes for great time lapse videos). When I wrote a program to read in millions of stored jpeg files and compress them, I had several unexpected errors which were as a result of a totally garbled disk sector at start of jpeg image. These were probably disk related and were always 1 sector long. This was before HDD’s had SMART built in so it wasn’t clear if disk was in pre-failure mode or some bits in HDD RAM got clobbered with a cosmic ray and a file was lost as a result.
Maybe I’ve just been around computers for too long as I’ve seen too many pieces of electronics fail to trust them completely.
Just wait until they outlaw driving and have the self-driving vehicles mandatory … then watch the death toll skyrocket.