Google Maps is ruining us

Always force it to suggest main routes, even if suggest a route with less traffic.

What does the author propose as an alternative? He's in Sicily, so he can't rely on his own built-up knowledge. Maybe he's suggesting asking locals, but nothing's stopping him from doing that, and it's not so easy.

So yeah, online maps have downsides, but what concretely is the proposal?

I had to get to a bus stop near a highway in a very rural area, and Google Maps led me through a (albeit gorgeous) winding path through farms and forests, until the underbrush started taking over the road. With the last bus time quickly approaching, and having to get to the next island over as that's where my next hotel was, I was starting to get desperate, rushing through vines and fallen tree limbs.

The path ended with a gate, looking nothing like what Google was telling me the path should.

Eventually I back tracked, and arrived just in time for my bus. I had leaves in my hair and my legs were all scratched, which left this gaijin looking even more like like a sore thumb in this rural island.

All this to say, I was dumb and frankly a bit ill prepared for this particular leg of the trip. In very weak, tepid defence, organizing these smaller details in rural areas of countries whose language you don't speak can be at times challenging.

And with a paper map, you would have the intuition that it might be stale, so you ask a local. Whereas Google Maps is marketed as the latest and greatest and most up-to-date, so you wind up trusting it, even over your own senses sometimes!

The trust is the mistake, but it's hard not to fall into that trap when it works reasonably well most of the time. But it's a fragile system--when it fails, you're truly SOL. Whereas paper and people are anti-fragile--they're less trustworthy but because of that, they're also more resilient. Who hasn't gotten directions from a stranger and wondered if they were a troll or an imbecile? And then either gotten a second opinion or proceeded with caution?