Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#2German tourists...who did make it out alive.
Recalling a family of German tourists in America, who sadly did not - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans
(And if you've not read the tale, and have some spare time, this is a classic - https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu... )
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#3I thought we stopped blaming the computer for idiot drivers 20 years ago when it was Garmin and Tom Tom rather than Google.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#4Such occurrences are so common today, there is even a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS
It is a combination of bad planning and bad judgement that wouldn’t kill you in urban areas (where ambulance response time is below 10 minutes) but can get very dangerous in remote areas in no time. The couple has hopefully learned their lesson. They were very lucky.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#5I remember going to a town marked on a rand mcnally map in British Columbia once, it was small but clearly a settlement.
This was before the days of smartphone maps
Roads became unpaved, then turned into dirt tracks, then eventually little more than grass.
Eventually got there and there was a single ruin of a shed next to a railway line. There had never been a settlement there - I suspect it was a copyright trap.
We had a compass, a fix on our location, and enough to keep warm and fed and were less than a day’s walk from the main road, but the point is people got lost and misdirected by maps well before the days of GPS and google maps.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#6It looks like indeed there is no overland road to Bamaga.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#7I remember going to a town marked on a rand mcnally map in British Columbia once, it was small but clearly a settlement. This was before the days of smartphone maps Roads became unpaved, then turned into dirt tracks, then eventually little more than grass. Eventually got there and there was a single ruin of a shed next to a railway line. There had never been a settlement there - I suspect it was a copyright trap. We…
I'm curious — why did you want to go there in the first place?
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#8I thought we stopped blaming the computer for idiot drivers 20 years ago when it was Garmin and Tom Tom rather than Google.
The darwinian process of natural selection took care of things 20 years ago. Without those to tell the tales and after a brief period of time the lessons of past generations were forgotten.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#9I live on an old farm. I'm connected to a neighbour by a track that is narrow, has a steep drop with no barrier and a ford at the bottom. After decent rain, the ford is more like a full-blown river. It is a public footpath but otherwise is only suitable for quads or farm machinery. There's no way of turning around when you're committed. There is not a road or bridleway, there is no public access unless on foot.
At some point, presumably from satellite imagery, Google decided this was a road.
Now google maps regularly directs folk down my private drive and on to the track where they have a terrifying journey or end up having to be towed by a tractor. No amount of 'report a problem' tickets have resolved this and it's been going on for years now.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#10I live on an old farm. I'm connected to a neighbour by a track that is narrow, has a steep drop with no barrier and a ford at the bottom. After decent rain, the ford is more like a full-blown river. It is a public footpath but otherwise is only suitable for quads or farm machinery. There's no way of turning around when you're committed. There is not a road or bridleway, there is no public access unless on foot. At so…
Why don't you install a gate with a warning?