Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you install a gate with a warning?
> why don't you pay money to fix someone else's mistake?
“It’s not my fault, but it’s my problem” is, like, the cornerstone of adulthood.
Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#22I 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…
As a non native speaker, at First I thought to myself „why is there a ford (car) at the bottom of the drop“ :D
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#23I 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?
Why go anywhere when you’re just gonna end up back home again!? /s
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#24The 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 an…
Jumping in before someone from Melbourne tells you about hook turns.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#25Google here routinely sends people on really bad tracks you have a hard time turning around or backing around from unless you are experienced with/on them and with the car you are driving. People this happens to are usually tourists with rental cars so they don't know the terrain or the car. When they turn to ask for help I often ask how you thought it was a good idea to get of the actual road with signs and asphalt and got onto the dirt track that seems to be made of loose stones and sand and goes on a 20+ degrees incline into somewhere you cannot see. Didn't you look on the map before you went right, to see if there even is anything there. Google said they had to go there even though most of these paths don't go anywhere... Did they use to? I don't know but not the past 15 years I have lived here. It's weird.
Also, reminds me of: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/man-fr...
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#26German 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... )
I have no problem when people kill themself because of their own stupidity, but killing your own children, that it is a tragedy.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#27I 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…
Reminds me of one of my dad's old stories - about a prosperous farmer, who lived on a dirt road. The road had a horrible mud hole a hundred yard or so beyond the farmer's barn.
By day, his farm work was forever being interrupted by optimists and city folks, who had to offer him several dollars to get him to haul their motor cars out of the mud hole. (Back then, several dollars was serious money.)
By night, he never got enough sleep - he was too busy hauling water up from the river, to refresh the mud hole.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#28Stories like this always remind me of when I first moved from my small town to the big city. I did so with another guy from my town who was going to the same college as I was. It's an 18-hour drive to the town I went to college in... So my buddy and I decide to go together, and his dad will drive us in their truck. This was also over 20 years ago. The morning of they show up, we load up, say goodbye to my family, and off we go! About 10 minutes in my buddy giddily said to me "It's only going to take us 14 hours! We found a shortcut!" - and he pulls out 2 pages of printed-out MapQuest instructions.
...26 hours later and various 6ft wide logging paths later, we arrived at college!
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#29German 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... )
I have no problem when people kill themself because of their own stupidity, but killing your own children, that it is a tragedy.
I would not be so harsh. They had limited resources, no familiarity whatever with how unforgiving and lethal the wilderness of the American West can be, and made what the local search & rescue folks seem to regard a series of "reasonable, but ultimately tragic" assumptions & decisions.
Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route
#30I’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 butt…
I just keep going and tell the GPS to deal with it until it stops chiming at me and finds a new route