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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

#161

Post by zalebz »

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…

I think the answer is to put up a gate with keypad and just provide the code to the landowner that has right of way. expensive but 100% effective.

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

#162

Post by KMag »

In Hong Kong, it's nice that Google maps has some hiking trails, but it has no notion of trail quality. Hong Kong really has some great official hiking trails with markers every 1 km, mostly dirt, but with some concrete sections. Google maps also has some very questionable routes, with no indication that you're going to be blazing a trail through 6-foot high brush or scaling a rock with help of a very sketchy rope cobbled together from several ratty ropes.

I do see now that the Mount Butler HF radio station is no longer marked "Gas Station" (hint: barbed wire and guard dog warning signs aren't common at gas stations) on Google maps, so at least some things have gotten better. At least the desktop maps also have some indication of trail quality, but it shows as a high quality trail the most direct trail from Explosive Ordinance Disposal Depot at the Quarry Bay rock quarry to Jardine's Lookout on the back side of the quarry. That trail includes a scramble up a rock face with the assistance of a cobbled-together sketchy rope, and trail blazing through bamboo leaves that will give you paper cuts. My wife now refers to that path as "I will kill you Hubby Mountain".

When we first moved to North Point, my wife and I were looking for an alternative route from our place up over the mountain range to Stanley. Google maps ended up taking us to the Morning Garden (fair enough), but then through a bunch of knee-length grass where the trail was apparently only virtual, down to the front face of the quarry in Quarry Bay, past the police shooting range and the EOD Depot, up a narrow concrete flash flood control ditch, and up a rock face assisted by a cobbled-together rope some kind soul left for others, and finally a scramble to meet Jardine's Lookout at the back side of the quarry. It wasn't that dangerous, but it was very rough and my wife wasn't happy about bamboo leaf cuts on her legs. Google maps really should have had us continue on Sir Cecil's Ride until it met the Wilson Trail behind the quarry, instead of taking a shortcut through Morning Garden.

We always take plenty of water and download the government map PDFs to our phones. I have plenty of experience navigating the wilderness on the US-Canadian border. I have plenty of orienteering / map reading as well as dead-reckoning experience. Still, it'd be nice to have a trustworthy navigating app to double-check my route.

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

#163

Post by AlotOfReading »

manigandham wrote: post #151
AlotOfReading wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't necessarily help in the given example. Desert stream beds often look very similar to roads on satellite and furthermore, data rates are abysmal in most of these places. You frequently can't load much beyond the cached basemap to check.

You can check the road surface, see the surrounding terrain, check for any signs or intersections or proximity to structures, etc. At the very least, you should zoom out enough to check that your path actually ends up going to your destination. If you don't have data access then Google Maps routing won't help much either. It all comes down to offline/hard maps, situational awareness, and basic wayfinding to get throu…

Here's an example from El Malpais in NM:

Streambed: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.991622,-108.0730561,94m/data...

Lightly used dirt roads: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9927729,-108.076162,158m/dat...

As for the data issue, Google maps (by default?) caches the turn-by-turn directions when you start navigation. Spotty cell service isn't really a problem until you make a wrong turn.

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

#164

Post by Shog9 »

s0rce wrote: post #153
bumbada wrote: post #98

There is something I don't understand. A radiator is not necessary for a car to work, specially in a freezing place. A radiator is needed to refrigerate the engine. In a very cold place the engine is refrigerated just by natural convention. Probably you will have to stop and open the car hood from time to time. Without globes touching metal could be dangerous, but it is strange. Traveling to very cold places,what you…

That's an interesting point, I tried to search but I couldn't find any examples. Can you really run a watercooled engine without coolant or a radiator in arctic (-40 to -50C ambient temperatures?). Its not like an air cooled engine designed for natural convection. Seems like at the very least they could run the engine as long as possible until its about to overheat, then turn it off and it will very quickly return to…

One possible hitch: if you lose ALL your coolant, you might have a hard time monitoring your engine temperature, as the usual temp gauge monitors coolant temp.

Might still be fine, but... By the time you know it ain't, could easily be too late.

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

#165

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

The problem Google maps has is it has no real concept of route quality, only route distance. It will happily trade a few minutes for a lot of work trying to identify turns and slow narrow roads with various obstacles.

I always review any route Google gives me and 95% of the time I make some sensible adjustments that get me there quicker and easier.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

gbh444g wrote: post #125
hirundo wrote: post #34

Travelling from Durango Colorado to Reserve New Mexico, Google Maps routed me to a "road" that was simply a dry stream bed, in the middle of Navajo Nation, in high desert wilderness, many miles from human habitation. It happened gradually. First I was directed to a well maintained gravel road, then to dirt track, which forked and forked and slowly faded to nothing. I was driving a 4x4, had an almost full tank, a load…

Ha. I think I have an even better story. Near Salt Lake City there's something like an island with two roads connecting it to the mainland: one on the north and the other on the south. My plan was to drive to the island via its north road (paved and well maintained) and at sunset leave the island via the south road. I got suspicious when in complete darkness the rather narrow road across a weird desert-like substance…

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by cratermoon »

Much like the self-driving car, the algorithms behind Google Maps were written, trained, and tested in places where the engineers work and commute. Much like facial recognition algorithms, they completely lose their minds when the reality of life doesn't match the biases of the data used for training.

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

#168

Post by schoen »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #30
random5634 wrote: post #3

Here's a link with an image of the highway of bones: https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-12-23/perdidos-en-la-t... Here is a video of a drive along it between the cities mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J46vglp6g98 Insane cold in this area - I'd be curious what type of preparation they had for this, and why not turn back if things were impassable? Google in the USA maps lots of roads that a…

The article says a stick punctured their radiator. So no chance to turn back. I’m guessing “stick” should be translated differently, but anyway their radiator was ruined.

Probably more like a "log" (original article says "un tronco o una piedra", like 'a log or a stone').

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

#169

Post by KMag »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #156
nicoburns wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It happens all over in my country, Australia. My neighbor has signs, I've petitioned Maps several times that it's private property and nope: ignored. A friend of mine just bought a property in regional Australia, and Maps wants to send anyone going to going to his place via forestry roads and then across two private properties to get there, despite having main road access. Once in another part of Oz, we were sent up…

Paper maps also never run out of batteries or refuse to work as expected because they can't reach a cell tower. I'm so glad my parents took me camping on the US-Canadian border as a kid and forced me to navigate for the family (with them double-checking). Teach your kids to navigate by map. When you really need it, you really need it.

Hiking in Hong Kong, Google maps disagreed with the route I was attempting to take on Sir Cecil's Ride back around the back side of the rock quarry. Google maps took us across the front face of the quarry, past the police shooting range / Explosive Ordinance Disposal Depot, and up a sheer rock face next to the quarry with the assistance of a cobbled-together rope some kind soul left for others, then through a bamboo thicket that cut my wife's legs up. My wife no longer insists on following Google maps if it disagrees with the hiking route I'm planning.

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

#170

Post by manigandham »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #163
manigandham wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can check the road surface, see the surrounding terrain, check for any signs or intersections or proximity to structures, etc. At the very least, you should zoom out enough to check that your path actually ends up going to your destination. If you don't have data access then Google Maps routing won't help much either. It all comes down to offline/hard maps, situational awareness, and basic wayfinding to get throu…

Here's an example from El Malpais in NM: Streambed: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.991622,-108.0730561,94m/data... Lightly used dirt roads: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9927729,-108.076162,158m/dat... As for the data issue, Google maps (by default?) caches the turn-by-turn directions when you start navigation. Spotty cell service isn't really a problem until you make a wrong turn.

Like I said, if you zoom out then you can clearly see the actual "Ice Caves" road #53 with lane markings, and a smaller "Ice Cave" dirt road that ends near that group of buildings. Everything after that is just dirt, no roads at all regardless of what Google says, which is my point.

Zoom out, assess the terrain, look for markings, check for buildings, and compare paths to the destination. Unless you're visiting the bottom of the crater there, you shouldn't ever be going off that main highway.

The map tiles should also cached (how else would it show you the turns?) but yes offline/paper maps are a must when going into unfamiliar areas.

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