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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

#41

Post by senkora »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #24
yummypaint wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_turn

> A hook turn (Australian English) or two-stage turn (British English), also known as a Copenhagen Left (in reference to cyclists specifically),[1] is a road cycling manoeuvre or a motor vehicle traffic-control mechanism in which vehicles that would normally turn from the innermost lane of an intersection instead turn from the outermost lane, across all other lanes of traffic.

Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

#42

Post by pvaldes »

afr0ck wrote: post #10
billyruffian wrote: post #9

I 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?

May I suggest to create a "mine field, you will die" banner in your property with stones big enough to be picked by the satellite photo in the next update?

Or you may prefer a tasteful "sea crocodile sanctuary" traffic signal (Extra points if you draw the crocodile eating a tourist holding a beer and wearing Tyrolean pants).

Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

#44

Post by kuchenbecker »

anonzzzies wrote: post #25

Google 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…

I live in the bay area and routinely get told to go down a one-way mountain road without cell service. If there was cell service Google would know they created a traffic jam.

Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

#45

Post by gthrow12345 »

Pinus wrote: post #11

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 butt…

There is actually the opposite problem now with Google Maps, where you'll be traveling happily on a route and it will tell you "we found a route that's 20 seconds faster by taking you down a road you want to avoid, take your eyes off the road to press a button on your phone immediately or else we're swapping you to it!"

And even if you're at a place where you can safely hit the button, it keeps trying to do it over and over again every time you pass a new exit that can take you to the new route it's trying to foist on you.

As far as I can tell there's no way to make it opt-in, configure it so that it only swaps you if it's a big time savings, or turn it off completely. The only suggestion I find online is to turn off mobile data which means that you then lose real-time traffic updates entirely.

Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

#46

Post by waste_monk »

billyruffian wrote: post #9

I 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…

>No amount of 'report a problem' tickets have resolved this and it's been going on for years now.

Have you tried submitting a correction to the map itself [1] [2]? It may take a while (not sure about Google Maps, but I submitted some corrections to OpenStreetMap a while ago and it took a couple of months before they were reflected in my Garmin GPS) but hopefully should eventually resolve the problem.

Alternatively, there are other means of manipulating Google Maps, such as fake traffic jams [3] that will dynamically reroute traffic around it.

[1] https://support.google.com/maps/answer/10271004?hl=en&co=GEN...

[2] https://support.google.com/maps/thread/124271401/how-to-i-ge...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-ar...

Re: Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

#47

Post by wil421 »

Larrikin wrote: post #35
wil421 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 va…

If this is a true story about a fake city, why use a fake name instead of calling attention to the real issue?

It’s too close to my home for comfort. You can probably guess metro area where I live based on comments but not within a couple miles.
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