I’m not familiar with modern (or any, for that matter...) car navigation systems. Do they have a big "NO!" button? The ones I have seen seemed very intent on planning one route, and then following that, no matter what. If you could not make a turn because it was blocked by some road works or whatever, the satnav would just keep trying to direct you back to that point. It would have been nice with a big NO/UNABLE button to push to get an alternative route.
Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
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Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#12The quality of google maps routing has become terrible over the past few years. I sometimes visit a few Indian cities on work. There are many places that you can walk to. Interestingly, Apple maps on my iPhone shows me at least 2-3 good walking routes, while google maps tries to get me killed on busy thoroughfares or tells me to walk across eight lanes of peak-hour traffic.
When taking a cab, google maps increasingly routes me through narrow roads, streets that can only accommodate a bike, or the wrong way in one-way roads. Apple maps usually gets it right. Sometimes google routes are just plain wrong - it takes me to the wrong destination - and I'm left scratching my head as to how the heck any algorithm that worked earlier could do this now.
I remember a time when Google maps was not this terrible.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#13I 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?
> why don't you pay money to fix someone else's mistake?
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#14I 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?
There is a gate, with a warning. That stops most of the delivery drivers. Tourists, not so much.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#15Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#16Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#17It looks like indeed there is no overland road to Bamaga.
Sure there's a road there ... it's just your typical northern Australian, specifically Cape York type road .. they can get a bit extreme for the unwary.
https://youtu.be/l_sY-gp_pqg?t=228
If you hit such roads in the wet you're going to get bogged - and extracting yourself from wheel deep mud is an arcane artform.
Fishing & 4WDing in West Cape York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB3ia158GOI
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a gate, with a warning. That stops most of the delivery drivers. Tourists, not so much.
Fair enough. Hope Google will do something about it!
Google will do nothing. I’ve tried for over a decade to get a fake city removed from Google Maps. I’m making the name up but imagine you have a neighborhood near you called Northfield. When google maps started someone from the neighborhood thought it would be great to make up city with the same name.
No amount of complaining will remove it. It only exists on Google maps, not on Apple Maps, Waze, Openstreet, or the various garmin/navitronics outdoor/boating navigation apps I have.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#19The quality of google maps routing has become terrible over the past few years. I sometimes visit a few Indian cities on work. There are many places that you can walk to. Interestingly, Apple maps on my iPhone shows me at least 2-3 good walking routes, while google maps tries to get me killed on busy thoroughfares or tells me to walk across eight lanes of peak-hour traffic. When taking a cab, google maps increasingly…
A few years ago google maps told my wife and I to "use the left lane to turn right" at an intersection of major 5 lane roads. The diagram even showed a car in the far left turn lane making a suicidal right across all the traffic. I couldn't believe it. Not a new road either.
I can understand a bad sequence of directions emerging from the process, but issuing an individual instruction that on it's face is dangerous and wrong?
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#20I 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 don't know Canadian rail history, but in the U.S. I'd suspect that the settlement did exist - at least in the RR's marketing plans. And maybe in some dusty legal paperwork, too. And at some point there might even have been a RR work camp, or logging camp, or some such.