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Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

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Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#131

Post by abathur »

mordechai9000 wrote: post #108
abathur wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just reading this gave me a hit of anxiety. Despite having never done so, I have recurring dream trope where I've naively driven a car into some place it was easy enough to enter, only to realize it was quite inappropriate. FWIW, a few years ago Google Maps also gave me wildly inappropriate directions on the way to Yosemite (i.e., in Google's ~back-yard). I called it off when it suggested I start off up a dirt road t…

I had the experience you fear in Germany. The gps directed me into a pedestrian area in the old part of the city. I drove quite a ways before the pedestrians suddenly closed around me and I was unable to move. It was technically legal, but pedestrians have the right of way and the speed limit is 5 km/h. It was very stressful at first, but eventually I resigned myself to the situation. I had to slowly execute a 180 de…

Mortifying. :)

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#132

Post by rolph »

slickrick216 wrote: post #126

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for…

you cant gate it but you should be able to ~park~ vehicles in your own driveway.

there is a situation similar to this near me and it has caused damages and near fatalities as vehicles moving 50 mph roar down the driveway, round the bend and suddenly there are people, a well head a house and a seafright container up front and center.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#133

Post by kunkurus »

anm89 wrote: post #59

I had a few similar situations while riding a motorcycle through Peru. https://andrew-max.github.io/adventure/2017/03/24/huamachuco... Google maps would reroute me around perfectly good highways because some goat trail somewhere was technically a shorter path although the reality was that they were 10x longer because of how difficult the terrain would be and if you were to brake down on any of those roads, you would…

Had a similar experience in rural Romania. Google recommended a shorter path but the trip was longer because the road was an abandoned one. The average speed was ~10-15Km/h.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#134

Post by mulmen »

nicoburns wrote: post #128
slickrick216 wrote: post #126

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for…

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be a large sign at the entrance to the driveway.

There is no way the general public trusts a sign over Google.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#136

Post by neffy »

nicoburns wrote: post #128
slickrick216 wrote: post #126

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for…

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be a large sign at the entrance to the driveway.

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be for Google to provide a sensible way to accept corrections to their maps.

We had to get a change made to Google maps to prevent people getting killed here, and it took national news, and personal contacts within the organisation.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#137

Post by pacamara619 »

Even in my town, with 40'000 inhabitants, there are some "roads" in the forest on google maps which were closed for over a decade (mostly for safety reasons). Especially when riding a bike next to the forest you'll end up on this road because google thinks it's a shortcut.

Truth is, after 500-600m what remains of the road, more of a path, is totally overgrown and after ~900, ~1300 and ~1700 there are fences (I went for a hike down that path with a friend after repeatedly being guided down that path by google maps).

I only use OpenStreetMap for planning my hikes and bicylce routes now.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#138

Post by lostlogin »

nicoburns wrote: post #128
slickrick216 wrote: post #126

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for…

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be a large sign at the entrance to the driveway.

I’d be gobsmacked if a sign helped. Signs are like v1.0 for pop-ups, pretty much no one reads them. It’s always amusing seeing the way signs in communal facilities change over time, nice, to passive aggressive to raw anger.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#139

Post by akiselev »

kzrdude wrote: post #84
s0rce wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of obvious and not so obvious places where routes can't be calculated, for example, when asking for driving directions across the Darien Gap: "Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions from "San Francisco, California" to "Bogota, Colombia"" Although in theory you may be able to make it across by motorcycle overland, there aren't any roads and as such google maps doesn't plot a route through ther…

Kind of insane that there's still a gap there.

It's not insane, it's rather on purpose. In the 1970s there was a huge concern that if proper infrastructure was built, it would cause foot and mouth disease to make its way from South to Central and North America, which stopped the USA's attempt to built a road across it. Within a decade, Panama turned much of the area into the Darien National Park and the UN classified it as a biosphere reserve & world heritage site because of a lot of the other concerns that came up during the attempt.

The epidemiological concerns haven't gone away and there isn't much interest in building across the gap.

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