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 directions. However a few times it’s gone beyond a mere nuance. They’ve had people show up at their door in the middle of the night and some won’t take no for an answer when they tell them google maps has gone wrong. On two occasions this has led to extremely aggressive behavior. My in laws are quite old and as the family tech guy I got asked to step in. I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. It’s now Google’s fault how people behave but maps have consequences on peoples lives.
> You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me.
I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named.
Other changes i've suggested have gone through in hours.
I’ve had changes go through, but sometimes in a monkey’s paw way.
I ask the labelling of a school on the map, specifying the name and providing the home town site as proof (a page listing all schools with their adresses and picture), and two days later it was labelled as “<Name of the town> school” completely ignoring the provided info and making the spot misleading. Requests for correction a few months apart didn’t do anything at this point.
So I can vouch for the process sometimes working, and I have nothing to do with Google. Now, why, when and how it works is a complete mystery.
> Now, why, when and how it works is a complete mystery.
Even when you're dealing with their non-public products!
Every holiday, Google reminds me I need to check the holiday hours for our business on the Google My Business page. So I do.
Every time, despite being the only authorized user on this page and despite the changes I make being nothing strange (things like being closed on christmas, and not to mention their system asked me to check it)......it sits there saying "pending review" for a week or more.
I don't really know what to think about it when they don't trust the business page's actual manager to get the info correct.
Afaik, the naming of locations is peer-reviewed automatically and by Google Maps users (they have the Local Guide program for this), but actual road changes are a different process.
OSM uses a different, also incorrect, name for the road. At least the name OSM uses was correct at one point (about a decade ago - also when that feature was last edited).
Indeed. I hesitate to change it manually though, as I know the (former) name of the road was done as part of a 911 upgrade in the early-mid 00's, and a lot of similarly semi-private roads renamed a few years after that. So OSM got their data from some official source a decade ago, and a number of roads throughout the locality are equally messed up by the lack of updates.
It is possible that whoever Google has hired for the local edits uses OSM as a reference in response to feedback received via Google Maps. Not explicitly of course, because this is strictly forbidden, both ways, due to license incompatibility. For OpenStreetMap this is a very important point, because well-meaning novice mappers copying streets or points-of-interest directly from a proprietary map put the project at risk of litigation. Google will likely have such a strong rule in their own internal documentation as well.
OSM strongly discourages the mapping of trap streets — fake streets that only exist on your map for unscrupulous competition to copy so you know that they did so — but it's possible that some mappers do put these on the map. I don't think one of the big proprietary maps has ever been caught copying one of these though.
I can confirm that Google appears to import data from OSM.
I added a placemark in OSM in the middle of Bali, Indonesia for an Internet cafe a few years ago, and it's currently also in Google Maps. (The cafe has since been closed for a few years.)
What's interesting is that's why I added it to OSM - to get picked up by Google Maps. :)
What's even more interesting is that when I told people in SV that I was doing that, they told me since it was a copyright violation, Google Maps wouldn't do that. :) :)
> "I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named."
I wonder if it would be easier to just change the street signs rather than convince Google to make the correction.
Near me Google maps displays a road that has been removed in 2008. When I found that out earlier last year, I used exactly this feature to suggest a removal. As of now, the road is still on Google Maps and the only response I've ever gotten was the automated email reply.
As a counter anecdote I marked a road as changed (one end was closed off) and it was fixed in a few days. I have made quite a number of edits to Maps so to me this is not at all what I have experienced. Maybe Google is different (IE. worse)) in the US than Scandinavia.
It's very variable for each edit. I've sent about 20 edits over time, all in western Europe; some were accepted rapidly, some were rejected for some reason, some are still stuck in review after months or years.
Even in the same area. A neighborhood name was added, but the street name change in that same neighborhood wasn't.
It shouldn't be up to people to have to spend time and money to correct Google's errors, and to stop Google inconviencing them. Somehow, it has become completely accepted for Google/FB/et al to make profits while shifting costs and externalities onto society.
Why do we allow these tech giants to treat us so disgracefully?
Do you even remember what it was like trying to find your way around a foreign city before google maps? They mapped the world and provided it as a service for free.
I do. I remember adding a lot of buffer time just in case I wouldn't be able to find my way. It is much more convenient now with G-Maps and other providers. I also remember how expensive the maps for the early navigation systems were and how bad they were.
There are two towns in rural Hungary which are reasonably well connected: you need to take a so called secondary main road then after a short time turn to another and again in a short time there you are -- but that's not a direct route even if it's fast. The direct route is an unpaved road cutting across the countryside near two tiny villages if you can call that a "road": more than half of the year it is an unpassable mud trap. The locals regularly need to use their tractors to get the hapless Google Map followers out of it. It's so ridiculous it became a national sensation.
> You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me.
My home address is wrong on Google Maps. It's correct on our national postal services' postcode system, but that only covers public post: most private couriers use Google for some reason. As do Uber/delivery drivers/taxis/etc. I live in an urban centre (Dublin, home of Google's EU HQ) so it's not some obscure rural farm.
I've used their suggest a change feature within Maps pretty much every month since I've lived here and even received automated responses telling me the suggestion has been "processed" or similar. No change to the map though.
You've been downvoted, but I think you have a point. Maps support & "suggest a change" are two different sets of ears, and while one may be deaf to this problem, the other may be more responsive.
I know it is trendy to bash Google but if you get millions of support requests it would be abnormal to forward support emails for something that has a very clear built-in function right in the product. It isn't a problem with Google that they don't reply to mail for something like this. It is a clear user error.
I disagree. The whole cool part of Google is organizing data and writing good algorithms. Even if they get a million misdirected suggestions a day, they are probably one of the best organizations in the world to figure out how to redirect correctly.
I did this for the Railroad Museum in Baltimore, years ago, where Google Maps deposited you in a very poor part of the city on the wrong side of the property. It took about two years before I got a follow-up email and the listing updated.
That would require you to create some association between your personal and work account right? I don't remember doing that. I guess they could match on first name and last name equality, but that sounds like a bad idea due to name collisions and impersonation.
You say you work for Google, so you must know that the company you work for amasses huge amounts of information on billions of people on the internet. It then uses that information to sell personalized ads to these people. Advertisers love that, and they pay the rates, and that's how Google makes money for your paycheck — and much more.
What makes you think they "require" any action on the part of these people to "create associations" between accounts? They are making billions by doing it because they can.
Because as a Google employee they understand what is and isn't done as a matter of privacy?
Do you have any evidence that Google spies on its own employees for the purpose of giving them privileged manual treatment when they don't ask for it?
Do you have any evidence that Google create associations between separate Google accounts to the extent of treating them as the same accountholder (asside from deleting duplicate spam accounts)?
Some years ago, I watched some historical TV show (could be Rome?) where one of the characters has been diagnosed with some disease, so I wondered if they knew how to properly diagnose it at the time the show was set at. So I used Google to search for the disease to get to its Wikipedia page. Then I almost forgot about it.
For months after that, Google bombarded me with the links to the disease and cures and remedies and whatnot.
I remember even seeing that at my kid's gaming PC, and I don't remember ever logging in to my Google account there. We only shared the same IP in the household.
That's pretty anecdotal, I know, but that's what there is.
If there was any such evidence, it would only be known to a small subset of people who work at Google. The only thing anyone else has to go on is very general privacy policies and Google employees commenting on forums! The public only has an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
>"That would require you to create some association between your personal and work account right?"
Obtuse af. Is this default assumption that the user is the one who has to "create" associations in the company's systems based on anything? The big tech cos have been social mapping since before 2012 and they undoubtedly register when two accounts use the same IP.
You really think that Google spent the time to build a system that secretly links employees’ accounts to their personal accounts—something that Googlers would have to build and would also piss off those same Googlers—and then uses that system to prioritize feedback from Googlers just to make their own employees have a better Maps feedback experience?
No, I think Google built a system to link every email address used by an individual and all their browsing habits. Not specific to their employees but to do that on everyone in the planet.
It also makes the simple connection that a user also has a google.com account without doing anything special.
Although I suspect they do have something home built as every single company I’ve worked for with a broad customer facing product has had some flag to note employee accounts. I built this sometimes and was usually to help understand if some random suggestion was from a bigwig worth looking up. You never want to be in a situation where “Ms So and So, EVP of some department you don’t know submitted a question a week ago and got no answer. She mentioned it to me at the EVP monthly hobo hunt, yadda yadda yadda.”
You're misunderstanding as you speculating. You've now shifted to "Googler has a special friendly-spying apparatus, enabled by its core technology", to "every company has the same apparatus, and low level line employees are treated the same as EVPs", which is absurd as everyone here knows.
And saying "hobo hunt" shows you obviously aren't engaging in serious conversation.
I was trying to convey that Google just already tracks all linked email accounts so it seems natural that they would be able to trivially identify or prioritize inbound suggestions from employees.
I also wanted to say that even if they did build a custom system to sort employees, it’s not hard. It’s not a super secret tech, but something I’ve personally implemented in an afternoon 20 years ago, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s easy to do. If they want to.
I added the “hobo hunt” joke as I think infusing humor in arbitrary engagements makes it easier to engage in serious conversation. And all my serious conversations involve humor. Of course, I seriously doubt that any company executives routinely engage in hunting homeless persons and used something extremely absurd and impossible.
So if I work from a coffeeshop all the other coffeeshop patrons would be considered Google employees?
Creating a system to secretly map my work account and my personal account in order to prioritize my Maps suggestions seems like a huge amount of work for no benefit whatsoever.
E.g. a coffeeshop has a constant stream of accounts on its IP that appear only once or twice. So it might be considered "a public place". So no association is done over accounts arriving from that IP. Your home, OTOH, might have only two accounts on its IP for years, so the association here is stronger.
A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.
The system might not be created "to prioritize Maps suggestions" only and has multiple benefits in other places. Most obvious of these is to prevent people banned from the service to come back with a different account.
(I don't work at G and never did, but worked at another place where we linked accounts.)
Sure it could be more intelligent, but there would always be false positives. For example a Google employee's spouse could likely get correlated. False positives sounds like a bad idea for a system that tries to match personal and work accounts. Also in my case it would be harder possibly because I have a ton of personal Google accounts.
>A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.
I never use the same browser for my work and personal accounts. But in theory that could run into the spousal problem as well for some people.
There is a ton of other information. E.g. for the “security” you are asked to provide a backup email address for your Google account. Also, for the same reason, everyone is now required to provide a cellphone number. If you used one of your Google accounts as a backup for another, or used the same recovery phone number for both, these two accounts can be linked to a same person. This comes in addition to other information about possible links, like geolocation or other trove of data they might have. If you added several accounts to check emails, your phone checks all of them every couple of minutes, from the same IP at the same time, whether you’re at home or not.
In short, the amount of data you are passing to Google, willingly or not, allows them to link these to a single person — you — with an extremely high certainty.
It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a very real thing that all the major players do and a bunch of 3rd party startups as well. Logging in from same browser, showing similar habits on the same IP from home, etc. it’s typically part of data enrichment. I worked on a project that tied into a system like this about 5ish years ago and it was fascinating how deep this goes. I thought I was just not on top of things but now I see a google employee also in the dark about it. This feels like one of those things 5 years from now will create a scandal when a journalist wraps their head around what it is
Associating these accounts using data like IP address, cookies, etc. etc., over time, is core technology for Google and probably happens automatically. Whether they use it to prioritize Maps suggestions I don't know.
Before you start working at Google and get an internal email address you have almost certainly communicated with HR using your external email address...a basic profile has been setup etc
A typical facebook/google employee defending his company.
Common is it that hard to link whether its same or different people? The people who use same browser, ip , same habit etc can easily be guessed right?
I don't use the same browser for my personal and work accounts. Yeah guesses can be made, but they'll have false positives (spouses for example). For a system to link personal and work accounts I think false positives would be bad.
Correct yeah that one. It got rejected 3 times and has now been under review for a long period. I think it’s something to do with when you type in the name of the area it marks it on the driveway. So people looking for the village of the same name as the area get directed there.
Where I live, they'll send you down logging roads and old, disused roads fit only for 4WD trucks.
It's not just Google. Other GPS maps will send you to my house on a road that hasn't really been passable for 30 or 40 years - if you make the mistake of not telling it to avoid dirt roads. But, if you tell it to stick to paved roads, it'll have you park about 2 km away.
I have no idea how to fix this, except to suggest that they update the maps that the GPS relies on. It's such a remote area that it's not a priority for them. Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.
The situation is even more complicated in ND where some section line roads are sketchy as hell but if they stop being used the adjacent landowner can take them over. This has led to some bad behavior like landowners putting up (illegal) signs and gates and it seems getting google to remove some legitimate roads from google maps.
Google doesn't use Android phone location data as effectively as they could for privacy reasons. Tracking people's location in aggregate to make decisions about which roads are usable at which speeds is okay, but as soon as you get to the levels of "only one guy went along this road in 2020, should we mark it as private", it becomes a privacy issue.
It's a privacy issue to use that kind of data, because the employees who build the map shouldn't be looking at one guys GPS traces. So instead the traces are cut into tiny chunks and aggregated and only shown where there are more than 50 people at the same spot. That effectively means there is no data available to make decisions on the most rarely used roads.
First, I’m not sure how much they would be concerned about privacy issues of only a single person over a year. They uniquely identify individuals over multiple sessions. I think they also wouldn’t need to know the specific identity (“John Doe”) and could just use their anonymized id (a unique individual whose name we don’t know).
Also, even if they choose to not do this for maps even though they do it for lots of other things, merely aggregate traffic info on roads would be useful. 364 days of zero traffic and one day with 30 minutes of one car would be useful.
> So instead the traces are cut into tiny chunks and aggregated and only shown where there are more than 50 people at the same spot.
The same algo that does that could tell the field mapper to go look at roads that are barely used (or whatever criteria ends up being the best), it doesn't need to tell them how many people or who went on that road.
Sometimes I think that Google create their road maps solely using satellite pictures.
Plenty of people with their Android phones will still go over that section with their snowmobiles, four-wheelers, bike, etc.
How does Google tell the difference between someone on an electric bike vs a car going on a dirt road doing 20-30km/h to not have rocks flying everywhere?
I ran into this problem a lot when I was living in downtown SF of all places. One should never drive in front of AT&T/Oracle stadium when an event is ending, as the traffic is insane and part of the road is closed to allow for the mass of pedestrians. But Maps interprets pedestrian traffic as car traffic and shows that section of the road as green and moving faster than the sections with actual cars, and tries to direct you down it.
Obviously we need to have Google connect our cars to the internet so they have more data points. And we also need Google to connect our bikes to the internet, that way Google can tell the different between a bike and a car. And we need to prevent the bike from being able to be used if the Google tech isn't charged and working, because it would be dangerous for everyone else if Google thought that person was in a car and not a bike.
You jest, but in time this will be true, not because of Google, but insurance requirements. Same for autonomous cars. You would still be able to drive your car yourself, if you can afford the insurance, and you won't.
I couldn't find a paper that talks about the specifics of this very problem. The ones I've found in the past fail with outliers like a bike going through stopped traffic and or the scenario above.
The best approach I could think of is they expand the time they're looking at to classify the vehicles before the outlier situations.
I believe you can get a lot of information from accelerometer data. Especially when compared with other data for the same road. Is it even used in this way?
Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.
Probably not. At least one person dies each year in the Mojave Desert because they were following an electronic map instead of a paper map. It's in the local news most times it happens.
The right answer is for the near-trillion dollar company to stop calling what is not a road a road I'd think rather than a rural landowner to have to go thru the expense of putting up a gate!
Maps have had errors since the dawn of them, yes, even the land registry isn't always right, and yes, even state as a whole sometimes can't agree on their border (i.e. France and Monte Bianco)
The right answer is for users not to be brainlessly following whatever their corpo device tells them to be the truth.
Just need a gate that exerts tension when it's opened, so it'll drift back to closed if someone forgets. I've crossed a lot of back-country gates, never seen a wild breakdown of the system.
Grandparent poster should've called it a workaround.. yeah the solution is to pester Google to fix their procedures, but how much time are you willing to invest on a war that you might not even win?
That could work only if the city ordinance allowed it. If not, they can request a variance hearing with the city officials to explain them the situation and (hopefully) get approved.
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.
In the US its pretty easy to submit corrections. I've submitted a few corrections on US public lands but now I usually don't bother and just update open street map instead.
I once submitted a correction for the exact location of a public park. The correction looked like it was applied, but when I looked later it had been reverted.
The data pipelines for maps can be very long - certain changes might take 6 months or more to be applied, because the computation required to rebuild certain things is massive, and it isn't worth doing simply because some street edge moved by a few centimeters.
I think this is the right approach. Why do free ground-proofing for a for-profit company? (Who is also so unresponsive). Better to submit fixes to a community project.
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 a cliff face, in the middle of the night, and it took an hour and a half to correct it's mistake.
Every time I try and "fix" maps by reporting it, and very very very rarely is it fixed
Another property has two "crown roads" on it, but to all purposes, they're very dangerous 4wd trails, again thru private property. The owner has signs, but the belligerent and unaware swear by the Goog, insisting it's correct.
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.
Even if they trusted the sign, I have observed that people (myself included) often don't even _see_ all the signs when we're being directed by the GPS. I'd love to see a study on what changes about your perception when using a navigation system.
The same happens when we follow the directions of a passenger navigating for us. My bet: part of us is concentrating on hearing instead of seeing. We've also delegated navigation to somebody else and that impairs our navigation abilities until we're back doing it ourselves.
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.
Submit a complaint to a state regulator. Someone at Google will wake up and sort it out once they get an email from their regulator to Google’s compliance team. If you can get a lawyer to submit the complain it’ll be even more effective.
Regulators get to determine what counts as a road and what is "just a trail" (it can be an important legal distinction), and they get to determine whether a particular road is public (even if it crosses private property), and in many places worldwide that official road map data is available from the government.
If that has been done, then it simplifies the dispute as you can objectively verify whether the complaint matches the official data and Google should not be routing cars there, or if the maps are correct and the appropriate solution would not involve Google - e.g. if a road is physically impassable then complaints to whoever is responsible for maintaining that road; if there are barriers or "do not enter" signs on a legally public road, then complaints to the authorities to remove these barriers and punish whoever put them up, if a path is marked public but you think it shouldn't be then legal action to try and correct it (which may or may not succeed), etc.
A very flippant "HN techbro libertarian" response. Pretty much everything that is not constitutionally protected as a right can be regulated, why would you possibly think that it couldn't?
Yes, you absolutely could lobby for someone to write a law requiring Google to respond to nuisance requests from their navigation services. That is basically what DMCA does, after all.
Hypothetical example law: OK, you have a good-faith presumption up until someone emails you a copy of a deed and proves it's their driveway, then you legally need to correct it within X days or penalties start to rack up.
You've said that stuff which isn't constitutionally protected _can_ be regulated, but the question posed was _are_ maps regulated. Are they? What legal obligation to accuracy or comprehensiveness are map-makers bound by?
And are maps constitutionally protected? If political donations are speech then maps certainly seem like speech.
If you want a solution for this today: put up a sign, with a google maps logo on it saying "wrong way" in big letters, below it explain that google have wrongly marked this trail as a road.
We live in a street named 'ms x of y' and someone renamed our street to y. As there was anither street called 'z x', deliveries were always going to the wrong street, or marked as invalid address.
Fixing it in OSM fixed it slowly in all drivers navigation systems and after a year no deliveries were lost anymore
Yeah I have it’s quite strange only Google maps seems to have it. It’s not on any official maps either. Think it’s happening due to it looking like a road and on the maps the name of the area being near the center at the end of the road. It ends a swamp too which is quite a shock for some people.
> Google, and other companies are welcome to use OpenStreetMap Data as long as they meet their obligations in the OpenStreetMap License.
But they do not make wide use of OSM data, because one of the terms of the license is attribution, of which there is none on any Google product I have seen.
I would guess they are big supporters of OSM as a hiring thing - by supporting an opensource project, you will get young engineers interested in mapping, some of which will then go work on Google Maps.
It also helps any antitrust cases if Google isn't the only game in town, which was the case for many years.
I love how this article talks about the neglect of the process from Google and probably says something significant about russia's relationship with google in general and google maps at the cost of two of their own citizens needlessly dying by freezing to death and in the top rated comments is bicker about whether an old couple should be the one to pay for a gate to stop accidental trespassing.
I get the problems are both of the same origin, but the discussion has a much better chance of making progress and getting Google's attention which is hard to do when people's lives are at stake. Or when they have been lost directly due to their own oversights.
Apparently there are people who try to mark public roads as "private" on Open Street Maps to discourage Waze from sending traffic. But Waze seems to love sending people via quiet roads, so maybe that's why Google is ignoring you. They think your inlaws driveway is a nice shortcut and don't care who owns it.
Goes the other way too. We were looking at some property and were aggressively confronted after going down someone's apparent driveway in the country just like this. It was not
at all clear it was a personal driveway and the person was quite rude.
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.
The monetary damages would be determined based on the level of nuisance caused, which could be objectively measured by the data google keeps on trip routing that has utilized that particular road.
Love the whole "nothing can be measured, who can say!?" attitude on Google of all fucking things. They log everything and delete nothing. Yes, they absolutely do know how many people they've routed down that person's driveway, and a subpoena/discovery would clear it right up.
Seeking damages seems silly, but I’m sure that’s something you could get a court to order Google to change.
Technically you could make the argument that the map directions are incitement/solicitation to commit a crime. But I doubt you’d get a prosecutor to pick up that case.
And Google intentionally make it difficult to get ahold of any actual human. I really hope they get broken up, they are clearly a monopoly and abuse their power.
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 of groceries and 12 gallons of water in back, and plenty of time, so I went with it for quite a while. There are lots of long dirt tracks in this area and I kept hoping that it was still a short cut. The shortest alternate route was around 90 minutes longer.
I think most sane drivers would have bailed at the first turn off of the pavement. I waited until the stream bed sand was getting deep before turning around. For some optimistic mobility impaired person it could have been a death trap. I've adjusted my expectations of Google Maps accordingly.
This is why I desperately want a routing mode for 'easiest' drive. Surface streets only, no left turns onto busy highways just to save a minute, no weird shortcuts through neighborhoods, keep me on the highway. I've had so many times where google has had me drive through sketch areas of LA which ended up taking more time dealing with cross traffic. All they have to do is give up on quickest route.
Even roads that should be real are in different state of maintenance, there's some very bad roads here in central Italy, the likes that will tear a wheel apart from your car but due registration show white or even yellow on Google maps.
I do most of my intercity navigation trough state and road signage, with the navigator on but only for the last stretch, like driving me to the address once we're close.
Around here, "navigator shortcut" had already become a derogatory term for their inane suggestions.
There's some that provide a truck mode, but I don't know what weights they have on their algos.
Via Michelin used to have a main roads mode, but they didn't give turn by turn back then only planning.
In the Netherlands we have signs like the one below. Telling you to stay on the highway and turn off your GPS. Because Google Maps and other software makes you take all these weird short-cuts. Putting trucks through small towns etc.. I think they also have them in Belgium.
To be honest, unless you know why the sign says this, it's not completely clear. Is it warning that your GPS will turn off? Is there EM interference around the area? Should I follow the road unless I've got GPS active?
I suspect it would take me a moment to process this into some action.
Yt doesn't help that there's a substantial number of "the best way to X is Y" (language varies) type signs that are not there because it's the best way, but because a semi truck once got stuck or because there's a turn involved that's terrible at rush hour or some other reason that boils down to the "wrong" way being the better option except for some edge cases.
A lot of people confuse "GPS" with "moving map software". I had a neighbor once say "My work's address is wrong on the GPS". There is likely nothing wrong with the GPS signal. It's just that the map data in the area may be known to be incorrect.
I agree 100% and this is a more serious issue in other countries. I've seen Google Maps lead you down some extremely dangerous areas just to save like 5 minutes.
Yeah, there's a reason roads in that area are so open.
It’s another example of unintentional bias at play. Most “Googlers” living in safe, well-maintained suburban USA assuming the rest of the world is the same.
Anybody living on the Bay Area is painfully well aware that there are seriously sketchy neighborhoods. It's probably more an issue of data: there are no street-by-street crime maps for most of the world, and neither can Google feasibly collect this on their own.
I've taken to just planning my route myself. Common sense and a good map rules when it comes to navigation. At the very least you should check the route that has been calculated before starting.
This is surprisingly common - a combination of target fixation and that hope that things will get better "just around the corner". People seem to be wired to push ahead instead of turn back and look for an easier route. I suppose a lot of exploration and discovery wouldn't have happened otherwise but then it's tempered by the numerous stories like the OP.
It's an old problem too. I vaguely remember seeing a driver training video made before I was born, warning drivers not to explore random "shortcut" dirt roads on their paper maps.
I've done this sort of thing before manually routing based on OSM maps.
A friend of mine and I rented a AWD vehicle to be able to drive on the "F roads" in the internal part of Iceland, which is beautiful but very desolate. (I'd be surprised if the inspiration for Mordor didn't come from some places Iceland in fact.) I had downloaded the OSM maps on my tablet and was just manually plotting routes that looked like they could be interesting.
It was great fun, but it sort of turns out that there are F roads and there are F roads. Some of the roads are fairly flat, easy to pick out, and you see a car at least once every hour. Some of the roads... well, one road went steeply up, then without warning into what was basically a giant sand bowl half a mile in diameter. We were in the "bowl", with sand who knows how deep (deep enough that the car had trouble making forward progress) before we knew what was happening. In the middle of nowhere, with no cell signal and not having seen anyone for hours.
Thankfully, by turning around and just keeping the accelerator on, we were able to build up enough momentum to get back over the ridge by which we'd come in; but it was definitely a close shave.
I could imagine the same story as TFA happening with OSM maps.
In openstreetmap, tracks should get additional tags such as tracktype, surface, smoothness.
If such tags are present and seem to be reliable, then OSM can be used to plan trips. Otherwise it is just too risky to rely on OSM. In particular in harsh climates and if there is no way to get help.
I.e., before using OSM, assess the quality of the mapping done by the local community. Anyone can draw lines of a map by looking at satelite images. It doesn't mean that such lines are passable.
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 through these areas safely.
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.
The area is actually full of ice caves and native sites that Google will send you on those dirt roads to get to. Also, regardless of what preparations people ought to do, there's going to people who rely solely on one method without backups. It should be robust to that.
I’ve been on legit roads in the middle of nowhere and not seeing marking or roads doesn’t mean anything (western USA problems).
That said I do think people should carry a $15 paper map booklet if they plan on venturing outside the city. I both have offline maps of the whole US and paper maps in my car, but I also do this a lot.
I’ve done enough naive exploring using only Google Maps to know that you have to use your best judgement. For example, Google Maps has guided down plenty of roads that end up being barricaded on the far end. Sometimes it guides me the wrong way on a one way street, which happened today (and I missed the no entry sign). And like this story, taking some suggested roads were at best calculated poor life choices.
They wholesale imported US government data that was developed to assist in finding residential dwellings (rather than for efficient navigation, TIGER). They've updated in lots of areas, but there's not really any good reason to assume they've updated it everywhere.
OpenStreetMap did the same thing and it's an ongoing hassle. It gets better all the time, but there's a lot of those features in sparsely populated areas.
I've lived in Washington for 10 years and I have found several roads I am familiar with that have changed due to landslides in that time. I would guess at least 10 roads in the state have washouts that change the course of the road every year. In the wilderness they often aren't repaired and become footpaths.
I can only speculate but I'd guess the issue is that the trees and mountains casue a lot of multipathing, theres no wifi stations or cell towers at all to cross-check, and the traffic volume is so low, you can't really fall back to statistical methods. That doesn't even get into the fact that there's often a labrynthe of private roads that all technically have the same name, typically given by rhe nearest large creek or stream. Google seems to have a REALLY hard time differentiating the gated private driveways from the more "arterial" ungated sections of these roads.
Caltopo and forest service roads are the best for last mile backcountry driving in my experience. Google maps is indeed really sketchy in those situations.
The app Gaia GPS has MVUM (motor vehicle use maps by the US forest service) that are outstanding. You can use multiple map layers at once. You can use the Caltopo plus the MVUM to see which areas are open and passable.
The MVUM are great but I've found that there are still many county and locally maintained but non-private roads, which aren't in the federal USFS/BLM MVUM and make it a bit annoying to figure out whats actually open.
Sure, you and I know that. But driving around with Google Maps in the city all year gives a false sense that it works great. Then when, once a year, you drive round the back of the mountain to visit Grandma you discover the hard way that Google Maps doesn't quite work so great.
Similar things happen fairly frequently if you ask for directions in remote areas, Google maps just directs you on long unmaintained old but officially mapped "roads" on public land. You really need to follow the land management agencies official maps to know the appropriate routes. Some paper maps (ex. Benchmark Road Atlas) are pretty decent and I've found worthwhile to keep in the car for these situations.
Once you get below the level of "real road," maybe best defined as well-maintained gravel road, databases get sketchy. (And even paved roads can be seasonal but at least these tend to have gates when they're closed--not that you can really count on lack of gates to mean the route is safe.)
Once you get off the beaten track, you really want to tap into local knowledge if you can. Don't just trust Google or paper maps for that matter.
Yup, I remember when I was going to check out the 2017 eclipse in eastern Oregon I wasn't really paying attention to the paper map and we were in a truck anyways but google maps routed us on a much worse road than the other option which is shown on the USGS topo map and the Benchmark Atlas.
Same thing happened to me in the B.C. interior north of Kamloops. I stopped when the “road” became a dry stream bed blocked by a cow that seemed as confused as I was by my presence in that particular place.
I had a similar experience in BC, same area near Meadow Lake. I was going with a buddy to camp and fish. My other two buddies insisted we take paper maps just in case. Same thing. Caught a fork, then the road turned to a dirt road and that's when we stopped, got out the paper map, and realized we took two wrong turns. It was dark and we had been driving most of the day and were pretty tired already so missing the initial turn was not a surprise.
Had we continued using Google Maps on our phones, god knows how far into the interior we would've gone before being in real trouble.
I was about to say, sometimes Google Maps point you right through people's gated farms in that area. It's beyond me how Google maps those out as public roads
A lot are on google maps now. Some forest roads are pretty high traffic through roads, where as some are made for the purposes of accessing a specific cutting. The later are often marked, but inaccurate as they been moved, or not maintained, or replanted.
Between maps + satellite imagery navigation was possible.
I have seen a ton of forest service roads as well on Google Maps here in the Okanagan. Some of those are indeed maintained and very usable even in small cars (Penticton to Highway 33/Big White, for example). Others not so much. Definitely had some sketchy adventures in my tiny Corolla on them. I never rely on Google Maps to navigate them though, and never with any intent of getting somewhere. It’s just exploration and if the road gets bad, you bet I’m turning around.
Heh, I had a similar one in Northern Italy. What started as an offbeat paved, then gravel, road degraded into something best described as a goat trail over steep hillside. The worst thing is when you start having doubts it's too late: backing out is even more dangerous. AWD came helpful but still had a few white-knuckled moments there.
I can't say I've ever really had one of those but I find that Google frequently has what I like to refer to as "Oh, Google is in the mood for a country drive" moment. It will take you on a bunch of back roads rather than a major route, presumably to save 2 minutes (assuming you don't miss a turn). Which is particularly annoying in winter (like this morning!) when there may be snow and ice on said back roads.
The worst I've had, which wasn't really that bad, was when I was taking a friend to pick up a canoe in rural NH and they were on a snow covered gravel road. Google routed me on a long drive on said road. Which was OK but still slow going. When we got there, they guy sort of laughed at the direction we had gone and said we should have come in the other way which only involved a mile or two of said road.
Not to downplay the seriousness: but "middle of Italy" doesn't really sound that bad. Middle of Russia or Middle of USA... could be deadly. Also middle of Russia way way worse than Middle of USA, as the article indicates.
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 of unknown density turned into an off-road trail with rather big rocks on it. I figured that if I kept moving at this pace, about 10 mph, I would get to the mainland in 1-2 hours, which was ok as I was young, full of energy and had plenty of time to waste. 40 minutes later I met a real obstacle: a segment of the road was gone, perhaps it sank into that sandy something, or perhaps someone intentionally made the road unpassable to save drivers like me from an even bigger trouble. Anyways, after entertaining the idea of driving around this gap (I had 4x4), I decided that the sandy substance might be a quicksand of some sort and getting stuck there without a car at midnight would be rather dangerous, so I made a u-turn and at the same crawling speed started driving back. The thing is, whoever was maintaining that island, rightfully decided that it was night time and it was time to close a gates across the only unpaved trail across the island. That would be a rather big problem, and I was even considering to break the gates, but luckily there was a very rocky way around across the bushes, that was quite passable on my truck. So I did just that and kept driving for another mile or so until the road got blocked by some strange luminous sparks, that upon closer examination appeared a herd of bisons. Those bisons were quite melanholic and didn't see anything wrong with camping on the only road, but eventually they cleared the path and 3 hours later I finally left that island.
Antelope Island is a fantastic place to visit! Glad you found your way back out, eventually. That southern end is very much not a road. Also, it's a good thing you were in a truck, as bison can be very dangerous. I used to hike there almost weekly, but significantly cut back once my brother was attacked by a bison and had to be flown out to a hospital.
Glad you didn’t get stuck there overnight and your adventure turned out fun after all. You wouldn’t have the bizons otherwise and you probably learned your lesson not to ‘explore’ dirt roads at night. I’ve learned my lesson a while as well
I have the opposite problem in rural Portugal, insofar as google maps resolutely refuses to recognise the numerous unpaved trackways around here as roads, even though they are far more traffic by locals than the paved roads, which are basically for trucks and tourists, and wind like crazy around the mountains.
With the tracks, the journey to our nearest village is 5km, and our second nearest is 7km away - without them, it’s 15km and 55km, respectively - as there are numerous bridges over the multiple north-south rivers here which don’t feature on google - probably quite sensibly, as many of them are in “is this is a road, or a landslip?” territory.
I mean, we’ve been here a year now, I know plenty of routes that look like they must just go off a cliff or something, but cut miles off journeys - but it’s largely been trial and error - more error than anything else when we still had a 2x4 - now that we’ve a 4x4, 30 degree mud-chutes qualify as roads.
There should be a “show me public routes which are theoretically navigable for a vehicle” option - Waze does this, but it’s hit and miss.
If you have local knowledge that some sketchy routes are actually valid shortcuts then you don't really need Google Maps do you? I'd rather Google Maps was conservative for the person without local knowledge.
In these scenarios I usually make sure to pan over the map to see if the routing recommendation looks sane, and use satellite view to determine road conditions. I don't feel comfortable blindly following the turn by turn directions as if I'm being led by a malevolent AI.
>I think most sane drivers would have bailed at the first turn off of the pavement.
Well-maintained gravel road seems pretty reasonable in that area of the country. But I'd probably consult my paper map at that point which I would also always have for that area of the country (had I not done so already).
I'll mostly put my trust in Google etc. to find my hotel in Silicon Valley. Not so much to get me somewhere in the rural West.
I can barely trust google maps in SV, because it seems to go very far out of its way to make a simple route complicated, usually along the lines of doing a U turn on a highway and a dozen other turns in order to save one minute on el camino. It took me quite a while to get acquainted with the area because i was always doing these navigation gymnastics instead of straight simple routes.
Not a Google Maps story, but a family died in Death Valley 24 years ago by following a map that showed a similar road that was not passable for their vehicle. Tragic way to die.
It appears that this and at least one other incident are why Google Maps no longer maps routes across Bear Camp Road, which is the most direct route from Grants Pass OR to the Oregon Coast. [1]
They do during summer. If you zoom into the Bear Camp Road, you can see that it currently says "(Closed Nov-Jun)". If you set your leaving time to July, you can see that the other route uses that road.
Excellent. That's the first time I've seen that feature.
There's still some odd behavior around bicycle routes. For instance, Google does not seem to show bike routes down CA-1 in middle California. I'm not sure what's going on there--hundreds of people do that route every year.
I had a similar experience this month in New Mexico. After ice and numerous accidents closed I-40, Apple Maps sent me on a two-hour detour through the Pueblo of Zuni, which, of course, was closed to non-tribal members to halt the spread of COVID-19.
I had a very similar experience in NW New Mexico. I expect to go off pavement for this sort of thing, but eventually we faded into what was very uneven dirt. Luckily we could tell someone had come that way in the last day because of an inch or so of fresh snow, so we made it through successfully to the destination where everything was well maintained. We went out the more common route south, but it wasn't that much better.
A similar thing happened to my brother and I back in 2006, when we were doing the Cascade Loop in WA. After leaving Winthrop, Microsoft's Streets & Trips GPS software on my laptop put us on a road that was gradually ridden with trees. We finally decided to turn back after a full tree trunk was cutting off the road and the asphalt almost disappeared. I checked the map later. If we had pushed forward, we would have crossed the border to Canada in two hours max.
Doesn't anyone know about Forest Service Maps? They don't cover deserts very well but if you are driving on backcountry roads in national forests it's kind of dumb not to have them.
This is what the Foundation novels and Sagan were describing; assumptions versus validation.
No one at Google validates any of their results. They simply operate on a large data set within the constraints of the machine.
IMO this is the problem with the technology industry; the only correctness that matters is the services are online.
It’s similar to the stock market being completely decoupled from the real economy. Oh yes all those math operations were handled just so, but you drove the lemmings off a cliff.
I’ve adjusted my expectations to society accordingly; lemmings.
This happened to me in the jungles of Indonesia.. [0] I literally followed google maps and rode my motorcycle into the jungle.
It started off a reasonable road and quickly became dangerous and then deadly. I rolled down the mountain side with the motorcycle and got very, very lucky that I was only mildly hurt (on top of the brutal sunburn I got on the ride). I ran into the local village (more like hobbled) and the first two people didn't believe that anyone could be stupid enough to do that (pantomiming because no one spoke English). I needed to find a teenage boy before anyone thought it plausible.
Happy to live to tell the tale, and I certainly won't be following maps blindly anymore.
Just yesterday I see drove onto a Google Maps recommended muddy dirt road road (like a dumbass) with my rental car just in the Mexican jungle. I thought I could make it, until I couldn’t. I got stuck in mud about 5km, walked through mud to the highway, and learned all about hitchhiking in Mexico, and asking locals for help getting my car unstuck. Good times.
Reading through this whole discussion thread it looks like the pattern is that Google Maps data is super sketch for anywhere that's not the continental US.
In September, I was in Hunza, northern Pakistan. The mountains are so tall, like 7k to 8k+ meters tall, I couldn’t even get a GPS lock most of the time. Even with a downloaded, offline map, it Google Maps was less than useless for navigation (still worked OK as a “paper” map).
Happened to me in much same way in Malaysia, when I went there on a holiday from Singapore using a bike of my coworker.
It was a surprise to get into such thick jungle so close to civilisation.
Though, I myself though I will never get into such a stupid situation, and probably those two thought of the same.
As somebody who spent childhood in Russian far east, I think wasn't even told not to fare into forests for it being so obviously dangerous as shown by lengthy necrologues in style "Ivan Ivanov 1980.1.1 went to forest on 2000.2.2, never returned, presumed dead"
That's a great story and worthy of a post on it's own.
I've forwarded it to a few people. It's also made me slightly sad about being stuck in the UK lockdown for at least the next few months. I love South East Asia.
We're doing well despite the pandemic; its been interesting to see how adoption of machine learning in consumer research has been accelerated during COVID because its no longer possible to gather lots of people together for tastings.
How did the "they asked for nothing in return" work out? Maybe in their social currency being able to say you helped someone generously is worth more than some money?
We see this fairly often with our Search and Rescue "subjects". It's a combination of target fixation and that hope that this is just a rough patch and the trail will open up again "just around the corner".
Just a couple weeks ago, we located and brought back a middle-aged couple who went out on an afternoon e-bike ride in the backcountry. They found a nice 20 mile loop of singletrack and forest service road on the AllTrails app and headed out with minimal clothing or supplies. The trail was beautifully maintained, taking switchbacks down from the ridge into the valley and to a campsite, but beyond there, it was in disrepair, overgrown, washouts, treefall, etc. But they kept pushing on - the loop they had planned was on the map after all. But no, the second half probably hadn't been maintained much less traveled on in 5+10 years and soon it completely petered out for them and they were left, deep in a valley, at night, with the temperature dropping, in shorts, with no water or food (he was a diabetic and they both had heart conditions).
My team dropped in from the far side which was closer to their location but even with multiple maps and satellite imagery could not locate the trail for any significant stretch which led to several miles of late-night bushwhacking down steep hillsides to reach them. Once checked out, provided with warm clothing, food, and water we all hiked out the way they came in which took the rest of the night and we reemerged at the trailhead at dawn. They were very lucky that due to the orientation of the canyon, they had cellphone coverage.
Happens fairly often.
Another one, last summer, was a guy who set out on a 3 day, 40 mile loop, got sick the very first day and instead of turning back, kept pushing on and was found severely dehydrated and still ill 36 hours after he was supposed to have completed his hike. He spent several days in the hospital...
As a tale of people in over their heads, over reliance on maps, taking the wrong road and not knowing when to quit and turn back in the American Southwest (which then turns into an international situation and doesn't have closure for 14 years) Tom Mahoud's The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans[1] is an epic and worthwhile read.
It has lots of great stuff about lost person psychology, search strategy, persistence, local knowledge, and extremely remote areas.
I will always upvote this link. The entire site is incredibly interesting. I believe it's made the frontpage a few times with some interesting comments IIRC.
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 are 4x4 only (but totally fine on 4x4).
Is this really a ghost road with no use in 20 years? I could pretty easily find some towns that would seem to be connected with it. Also plenty of adventurers and motorcyclists (??? how cold would that be?) seem to take it?
Did they by ANY chance turn down a farm road or some other side track?
A brief check of sat views doesn't really match the "abandoned for 20 years" claim being made here.
From this link posted in another comment it says "The two travelers - not dressed for extreme cold - evidently took a wrong turn and their car got damaged". So it does not seem to be because google suggested the incorrect route.
Edit: It was pointed out in the comments below that Google maps does go on the correct route now. It is the same general road, but there was a section called the "Old Summer Road" that had fallen in to disrepair but was shorter.
2000 km of ice covered road in one of the most remote places on Earth. People freeze to death on well traveled highways, never mind Kolyma; a place legendary for its lethality. I suppose it's fine that Google is making refinements to obscure routes, but understanding the fate of these people is better informed by Darwin's insights than anything happening at Google.
Not necessarily. Google Maps takes algorithmic approach to identify roads and routes, but as shown by this account and numerous others in the comments, sometimes that algorithmic approach fails and needs to be corrected by human intervention. If it’s known that some roads are dangerous and if it’s not difficult for Google to obtain this information, then there is a responsibility to intervene.
Oh, curious. I guess the data used by openrouteservice.org might be a bit stale. There was an edit three weeks back: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/95556786 "the section is practically impassable, this is no longer a road"
That graph just says they didn't bother cutting through the hills make a nice easy grade. The resolution isn't fine enough to tell you whether it's a potholed mud pit or graded gravel.
First rule of traveling there is never travel on one car/bus. There are so many stories about that, including a dozens of people frozen when a bus broke in the middle of nowhere
huh, seems like there are numerous towns visible on the satellite/aerial imagery on the "old summer road". Are those towns cut off in the winter (by land)? Do they have an ice road? Seems unusual that travel is easier in the summer. In northern Canada summer travel is often not possible by land due to extensive mud and bogs. In the winter you can travel across the frozen tundra much more easily (although you need to be prepared if you car breaks down).
It looks like their car (Toyota Chaser) was not fit for the purpose. I mean, looking at the car's wikipedia page I can see a city sedan that is definitely not adequate for off-road driving conditions at minus 40-50 degrees Celsius.
Judging by a couple of photos I could find on Google Maps it looks like in the summer the road is barely accessible using vehicles like the famous UAZ-452, I'm talking about this photo [2] showing a UAZ-452 crossing a river. In the winter I saw that these two people did it with a heavily equipped Toyota off-roader [3].
WOW! I would not have expected that be the car used on the "Highway of Bones" with insane levels of cold! I hope they were running it with chains at a minimum.
If you dress right, have a good thermal sleeping bag, have calories in your system, you can do pretty well. A fair number of sleeping bags have survival temps as low as negative -40. I've done OK once or twice at surprising levels of cold (sleeping in the back of car / SUV on a ski trip other winter trek is not end of world, even without cars heater).
Not totally clear still why this is a story about google.
In the winter the road is packed ice and easy from the vehicle traffic and the rivers can be driven over rather than forded.
In summer there are sections of mud pit, swamps, river crossings because the road is unmaintained. Anything with at least three wheels and a heated cab is fine in winter.
If the vehicle was actually unsuitible they would have gotten stuck within walking distance of town instead of putting a branch through the radiator trying to make an N-point turn in the bush after going the wrong way (probably down some little side fork).
Well, types who buy cars like these[1] are usually not the type who cares. Those are mostly known as cheap cars for kids to put on 1 megawatt turbos, and giant spoilers on.
They're actually more connected in the winter for exactly the reason you stated. Locals do use the road though. These guys wouldn't have gotten as far as they did if the road wasn't in fairly regular use. This is a forested part of Russia and nature reclaims things faster than that.
It's not a real highway anymore and there are some bridges out but the road is still used by local traffic (mainly heavy trucks and 4x4s that can more easily ford the rivers). It is more passable in winter because the rivers can be driven across and there is more ice and less swampyness.
Several people have done the road and other remote dis-used highways on motorcycle (in summer/autumn when it's more difficult but the weather is less brutal). The AVrider forum has several threads with lots of pictures.
Traveling these kinds of roads is common in this part of Russia. I would bet money that they had driven the "correct" route before and then when Google said the old road was faster they knew exactly what they were getting into and figured they'd give it a try because it might save time. Their mistake was not being prepared.
In the US (especially in the West) there are a lot of roads that are seasonal and/or that should really only be tackled with appropriately equipped high-clearance 4WD with a driver who is familiar with driving under those conditions.
Even a fairly straightforward off-paved road route like to the Racetrack in Death Valley, sees the local Jeep rental/tour company rescuing standard passenger car drivers all the time because they get tire punctures with no or crappy rental car jacks, etc. (Or they change tires and the doughnut spare lasts for 5 minutes.)
I've fiddled with Google Maps in the Death Valley area and my experience was that it wouldn't take you on stupid routes just because they are shorter. But if you give it a destination that can only be reached by a challenging road, it will route you on it.
> because they get tire punctures with no or crappy rental car jacks, etc. (Or they change tires and the doughnut spare lasts for 5 minutes.)
The sharp rocks of Death Valley and other super arid parts of Nevada was not something I had really thought about until I saw a picture of the car from one of my friends in Nevada. In addition to the normal full-size spare tire, there were two other tires stuck in the back of the car. He worked in a mine and apparently the road up there was full of these sharp rocks so there were days (not often) that he had to change 2 tires during his commute.
I imagine that it is particular type of rock prone to fracturing with sharp edges. But I also wonder if the sharper rocks more common because of the super arid conditions and are not worn down by the weather.
I drove on a farm track in the Coromandel, New Zealand. The track was very steep and there was lots of wheel spinning getting through. The sharp rocks messed up the tyres. On closer inspection the rocks were bits of volcanic obsidian.
Is that not the road used by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman in Long Way Round? Because if yes then that road was passable, but even in the summer they had to cross several streams and it looked like the only people driving it were locals in old 6x6 Kamaz Trucks.
In my personal opinion it's the weakest of the three - way too much time is spent on technical problems with the bikes and cars and very very little on culture and people of the countries they go through, it picks up in the last 3 episodes but that's 3 out of....11? I also hate the Americanised editing style where even in perfectly mundane situations there's extremely dramatic music playing, rapid cuts between scenes, and worst of all, episodes ending on cliffhangers like some cheap TV drama. Long way round and long way down had far more soul to them. But hey, that's just my opinion.
And the other thing - I really wish they waited just a year or two with this adventure, the tech they used was literally on the verge of maturing but 90% of their problems were due to driving prototype vehicles. Literally just a year after filming, there are both electric cars and motorcycles that don't run effectively alpha firmware.
Doesn't look that bad overall, especially at 8:50 in that youtube video, you can see a snowplow dropping salt on the roads as well. I would not call that an abandoned ghost road.
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.
-54C?! I've been in places where it got to -30C and it's .. weird. Things sound different outside. It's crazy how there are animals that seem to be able to survive it fine.
The problem is - as a non-local you can't really distinguish between Google knowing what it's doing and not until it's too late. For example I've been taken to the following:
AUSTRALIA - definitely not a "road" more like an unused hiking / herding path with nothing but lazy kangaroos in sight.
CHILE - down an unpaved half-lane road making its way down the side of a cliff, marked "mucho peligroso"
ITALY - completely off road over giant potholes and big rocks. Middle of the night.
ABU DHABI - across a clearly pedestrian plaza.
In all cases it worked out - as it happened to be traversable in my tiny rental car and indeed the way to get where I am going. But that's in retrospect, could have easily been "death by GPS" types of scenarios.
A few things I recommend when driving in places like this:
- refuel religiously. Don't let your tank get below half, as theoretically that should give you enough to backtrack to where you got gas last time. Not always possible of course.
- try to ask yourself - if I had to back out / turn around, could I? And be very leary of locking yourself out of that option (although easier said than done.)
- be mentally prepared to sleep in the car. At some point it is safer to do that and figure things out in the morning, even of there's a chance that your amazing tuscan villa airbnb is just another mile down the washed out road (cuz it may also not be)
- think of it as a fun adventure and don't freak out.
There was a clue though. It was the nickname of Kolkma Highway aka “Highway of Bones”. Anything named as “Devil”, “Death”, “Hell”, “Tears”, or anything else sketchy I would either read about or stay away from. The problem in this case is that Google didn’t show the nickname.
It held that name back when it was a major highway. It's not a particularly dangerous road by the standards of the region.
The other commenters is right that the name comes from the prisoners who died building it. Allegedly they were buried in the road. I say "allegedly" because everyone who's ever built a road knows that the road base is key to longevity and that adding things that will decompose to it is the opposite of what you want to do.
First, the highway of bones I think refers to the Stalin-era political prisoners that died building the road.
Second, Kalyma colloquially refers to an incredibly far away place. Like in English you may say "it's on the moon" to mean that something is ridiculously far, in Russian you say "to Kalyma"
Fundamentally, you don't end up anywhere near that region randomly. It's not like they were going for milk and died on the way to the store. It's hard to really understand what they were thinking - but there's no way they didn't understand that the whole area was ... challenging.
I don't quite understand the part in this about Google Maps changing the route. When I put in directions to Google Maps for Yakutsk to Magadan it still goes along the P-504 (aka Kolyma Highway or "Road of Bones" [0]).
The Wikipedia page also says that the road is called the Kolyma Route "since it is the only road in the area and therefore needs no special name to distinguish it from other roads"
Edit: Okay, it was pointed out in the comments below that Google maps does go on the correct route now. It is the same general road, but there was a section called the "Old Summer Road" that had fallen in to disrepair but was shorter.
When the road was upgraded, the route was changed to bypass the section from Kyubeme to Kadykchan via Tomtor, and instead pass from Kyubeme to Kadykchan via a more northern route through the town of Ust-Nera. The old 420 km section via Tomtor was largely unmaintained; the 200 km section between Tomtor and Kadykchan was completely abandoned.[6] This section is known as the Old Summer Road, and has fallen into disrepair, with washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams in summer. During winter, frozen rivers may assist river crossings. Old Summer Road remains one of the great challenges for adventuring motorcyclists and 4WDers.
I ran into a surprising problem with Google maps recently. "Ok Google, driving directions to Fremont Central Park"
Google locates the park address as 40000 Paseo Padre Pkwy, Fremont 94538. The pin is dropped in a fine place, at the building by the Lake Elizabeth boat ramp.
I mostly know where I'm going anyway, and as I come up Washington Blvd I notice it's asking me to turn early, so I follow just for kicks. Inexplicably, gmaps directs me to an area about a mile to the south of my destination, at the end of the Railroad Ave trail (https://goo.gl/maps/G5xV7MDemtbtmNYRA). It then appears to suggest that I park and walk the trail for a mile to get to my destination. In the middle of downtown Fremont! When using driving directions!
The weirdest part is that gmaps clearly knows that it's taken me to the wrong place. There's a dotted line instructing me to walk a mile along a footpath. But then, why not just take me to the actual destination address in my car, which has a huge parking lot? I can't wrap my head around what's going wrong in this scenario.
This wasn't a fluke. I reliably get told that this is the best way to the park. If gmaps can be this wildly wrong in the middle of Fremont CA then I can only imagine how bad it gets in rural areas.
I suspect I know the cause of this -- there was a change to Google Maps not long ago, related to how it computes destination points when your destination is a large area (such as a large park.) It used to try to take you to the official address, or some central point; these days, what I observe is that it takes you to _some_ point where the road hits the edge of the destination area. I'm not sure how it chooses what point, but it looks like it missed.
(Note: I don't work for Google, and haven't for many years. I mostly noticed this change because it finally fixed a longstanding directions issue that I first reported ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, involving directions to the Pittsburgh International Airport.)
That's pretty weird, thanks for reporting this! I work at Google in the Maps org, I reported your bug internally and will update this once I have a resolution.
I'd be happy to report routing problems to Open Street Maps or similar. I'm happy to contribute to open data.
Actually I would also have been happy to report it to Google a few years back but I have to say our relationship seems to have turned adversarial in the interim and I'm fairly sure it wasn't my doing.
Hey, thanks! Usually I use the in app reporting, but the thing about maps in particular is often when there's a problem I'm either driving or at my destination and need to go. In this case, I saw the story and then recalled the earlier issue. I figure talking about problems on HN has a very high probability of getting the attention of someone who can fix them ;)
Yeah, that's a pretty common problem. I'm sure they are actively working on making sending feedback easier :). In the meantime, your technique worked! The issue is now fixed!
Why does Google not have these links accessible somewhere? It seems like you shouldn’t have to hunt through old forums to find the appropriate contact.... why can a Trillion dollar company not make this more easily discoverable?
Tried that... you get a generic response and then no one ever follows up. Someone took over several of my email accounts and created a fake YouTube channel and Adwords/Adsense/Google ads account. Every time I reach out, they ignore and never get back to me. Pretty frustrating that Google is essentially enabling criminals and ignoring the victims.
In all my years of using Google Maps, I have never seen any message like "we cannot recommend a route for the destination you have selected". Considering that human lives are at stake, the product owners should be more generous to acknowledge their lack of knowledge rather than cobbling together a route using outdated information.
It is completely conceivable for an app to say: "we don't know, please use a different app" -- it's just pure greed for user engagement that prevents owners from doing this.
Similar life-and-death situations have happened in the past with Google Maps users in Middle East.
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 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.
> 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
That's fascinating!
Wikipedia shows that the disease is nearly eradicated in South America:
I’ve seen various warnings on walking or biking directions, as well as on driving directions using ferries or toll roads, or crossing borders.
So they are neither categorically opposed to warnings for any of the reasons you mention, nor are there technical difficulties. I guess the case of roads that are dangerous just happens to be extremely rare.
When I was travelling the US for a few months I drove the old Mojave road. at the end you pas by some lava tubes[1]. about 30min before that place there was a stranded Ford Mustang with a couple in it. They got stuck in the sand, had no water, no food and no means to get out. The were on their way to Las Vegas and wanted to see the tubes. they just followed Google maps.
Another time in I encountered another tourist in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, totally lost. Again, blindely followed Google Maps.
In Death Valley I crossed tourists in a rented SUV who wanted to cross over the Lippincott Pass to get to the Racetrack Playa, again following Google Maps. I talked them into turning around, there was no way they were going to make it. Also, they were not prepared at all (no water, food, etc.)
In Ecuador, Google Maps lead me down a mountain road which turned into a mountain bike track. I made it out in one piece, it made for a good story[2] but it is pretty damn dangerous.
If you are in a remote area, always double check google maps suggested, eg. with an OSM based map.
We actually saved a man whose car was stuck in the sand in the Mojave desert in ~2014.
We were cruising through the desert in mid-August, well stocked up with water as everyone told you to always pack twice as much as you think you'll need, and mildly pissed-off by the gas price of the only gas station we've seen that day. We barely met another car on the whole journey through. It was late afternoon, we were about 30 minutes away from getting out of the desert and we saw a man waving at us at the edge of the road. We pull up and we see he is desperate, his car got stuck in the sand a few meters away. Together we managed to dig a bit under his wheels, gathered some flat stones and shoved them under the wheels to improve traction. After a couple of tries he was able to get the car out of the sand and back on the road.
Relying on GMaps can be dangerous especially in winter, because it doesn't seem to take time of the year into account.
A few years back we travelled with friends to a mountain resort for the new year's eve. Instead of choosing a longer, well maintained primary road to our destination, it chose a slightly shorter secondary road through a high mountain pass, where it was snowing like hell and obviously no ploughs were around.
I was a passenger and wasn't involved in route selection, but the lesson is that it might be good to take time to discuss this before. Also, zoom out before driving and see high level plan instead of blindly following first-person view of the road. Or, you know, old school low tech solution: call the locals and ask for best road.
I mentioned something similar in another comment. This is the big failure I've seen with Google Maps. Secondary or very secondary roads in winter snow/ice. Doing the country drive thing is (mostly) OK in good weather. It's annoying or worse in a snowstorm or even residual snow.
On more than one occasion while driving through Italy last year, Google Maps attempted to navigate me to the center of cities by driving through ancient, pedestrian-packed streets barely wider than the hatchback I was in—even as (I eventually discovered) most non-emergency vehicles are not permitted to actually drive there.
In one such instance, I didn't realize what was happening until I had spent 45 minutes inching past the chairs of patrons in tiny cafes not a foot from my side-view mirror to eventually emerge from an alley onto the plaza of a cathedral in the city center much to the confused looks of the passers by.
Even in well-populated, first-world cities it seems it's wise to take Google Maps' advice with some healthy skepticism.
This is the sort of thing I find OSM much better at, being an actual map and displaying this sort of up to date information, not to mention actually rendering street names and important landmarks instead of random businesses. Of course you have to navigate the old fashioned way.
If I want to find the nearest ice cream store open at 9pm use google maps, it's a great location database. If you want a map use OSM.
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 that switchbacked its way up a cliff face in my mother's minivan.
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 degree turn, moving a little bit at a time, waiting for gaps in the foot traffic. It was quite crowded and no one moved out of my way. One guy chuckled and shook his head sympathetically as he walked by.
The difference, of course, being that the Top Gear guys have a full production crew and a bajillion dollars of insurance to smooth over any resulting problems.
I noticed the same thing - taking the narrow roads which are very hard to navigate instead of a slightly longer but much more comfortable main road. Is there a comfort toggle?
There are some areas in the world where Google Maps is totally unreliable. Here in Cyprus are roads in Google Maps which are only for good 4x4 cars, sometimes also totally wrong and the best part: You cannot report wrong things in Google Maps in Cyprus to Google. So no chance to correct it!
Many tourists drive with their normal rental cars into very remote areas.
So at the end I use OSMand+ (Openstreetmap) always and Google Maps only for searching.
On a trip through Sicily with my SO, I was driving through mountain roads in a compact rental car, and using a combination of an old GPS unit provided by the agency and Google Maps to guide us to our hotel (Maps' spoken directions were useful when navigating through Italian roads with Italian signs, while the GPS unit worked better in places without reception). We were already behind schedule, it was getting quite late, and had turned very dark (this part of the island isn't great about roadside illumination).
We arrived at a roundabout, and saw two signs, both pointing to our destination -- we could keep straight, or turn right. The old GPS told us to take a right, which would put us on a course to reach the hotel in an hour and a half. Google Maps, on the other hand, recommended going straight, in a more direct route that would get us there in 40 minutes. We'd had great experience with Google Maps in Sicily so far, and opted to try the route it suggested.
Driving past the roundabout, the road became a bit rougher, but not outside of the norm for the area. We wound around the mountains in the dark, and Maps continued to assure us we were getting nearer to our destination. The first sign of trouble came when we took another right turn, some time later, into a smaller road. We carefully drove around the first pothole. Then came another, and another. The road kept steadily getting rougher, but the car was ok, and we were driving carefully. There were absolutely no lights anywhere to be seen.
After a few minutes on this road, we started following it as it curved left -- and came face to face with reeds taller than the car. Our road vanished into them, turning into an old, rough path that had clearly not been used in years. I got out of the car to look around -- and could see absolutely nothing not illuminated by the headlights. No house lights, no street lights, no sounds except crickets. No cell service. Maps said we were only 15 minutes away from the hotel.
I got back in the car up to turn around, and the car wheels into mud and started spinning. It was at this point that my SO started freaking out. I don't blame her. We managed to, very slowly, turn the car around, drive up over the potholes, and make our way back to that roundabout. This time, we went the other way. Eventually, we reached our hotel, which was pitch dark with no outdoor lighting, had peacocks running around, pictures of Jesus nailed to the room walls, and a deserted wedding banquet hall for a restaurant, but that's a story for another day.
I still wonder where we ended up -- what that road looks like in the light of day.
Google Maps certainly likes to be 'technically correct' in its path finding / recommendations. It doesn't seem to adequately take weather / saftey into account.
When there is a serious snow storm or blizzard Google Maps will inevitably tell me to use an old (but still used) county road, rather than the interstate. I assume that google thinks this path has less traffic (true) and is faster (very much not true):
1. Due to weather conditions it is very much NOT faster, but I suspect due to the lack of traffic it seems faster than the slow interstate. Plowing through this county road is quite slow in reality, but the recommendation always remains...
2. This is NOT a road you want to be on during a blizzard or heavy snow event. It is not plowed as often as the interstate, and there is little to no shoulder so if you slide around even a little there's a super high chance you end up in a DEEP ditch.
Even worse sometimes it redirects people through local neighborhoods that are plowed even LESS often, presumably because it assumes the lower amount of traffic = faster, again that's wrong on every level.
In reality plodding along on the heavily plowed interstate is both faster, AND safer, but Google Maps seems to be unable to recognize this during these kinds of conditions.
ITT, lot's of anecdotal stories about people using map services and driving down crappy roads in the middle of nowhere. Here's some aggregated data to provide context on how road networks are composed and the changes they go through.
The road network in Sweden is comprised of 36 million+ distinct coordinates that form 3 million+ roads which are joined on 2.4 million+ nodes.
In the first half of 2020, 16 thousand+ class (funktionell vägklass) 9 roads were added to the network, consisting of 2,769 km of road. Class 9 roads are the highest classification of roads in the Swedish road network and is loosely defined as "where vehicle traffic normally doesn't occur but is totally possible". Class 9 roads compromise 38.2% of all road links in the Swedish road-network for vehicles.
This represents the lions share (64.22% number of road links, 75.33% km of road link) of the changes in the road network during the first half of 2020.
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 notice is that globes are not accessories, they are vital elements.
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 operable temperatures in the very cold conditions. Certainly better than dying outside in Siberia!
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.
A while back (probably last winter) I was driving a truck that needed a new thermostat, in what I thought was fairly cold weather. Reading TFA, I understand it wasn't really so cold. As long as the heater worked, I was fine. As soon as it started blowing cold air, I knew the thermostat had gotten stuck in the wrong position again. I figured out that I could simply slam on the brakes to solve this problem. In this fashion I was able to drive about 25 miles to a mechanic.
The truck had a functioning radiator and appropriate coolant levels. The only thing wrong was the thermostat. Even in that configuration, the temperature gauge climbed into the "danger zone" if I neglected the brake-slamming trick.
Google Maps is notoriously unreliable on Indian Reservations. If you’re ever driving near an Indian reservation, stick to state highways because the “shortcuts”may very well be impassable if they even exist.
Soemthing seems to have been lost in translation here? The "Road of Bones" is indeed infamously bad, but it's also the only road between these two extremely remote locations, I don't see how else Google could route them.
> Locally, the road is known as Trassa (Russian: Трасса – "The Route"), or Kolymskaya trassa (Russian: Колымская трасса – "The Kolyma Route"), since it is the only road in the area and therefore needs no special name to distinguish it from other roads.
Update: This image makes it clearer: they were told to go on a disused stretch of road, which is where they got stuck.
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 immediately be in a survival situation, it was incredibly remote.
It finally happened to me although luckily I was able to find an isolated farm but it's not hard to imagine if things went a little bit differently it could have turned into a life or death situation
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.
Nothing illustrates the vastness of Russia quite like a story with a map showing two dots that seem to be fairly close together yet labeled as “2000km, or 30 hours by car.”
Although some sources say the rode is in disuse, this documentary says it is an active supply route [1]. The road looks fairly maintained.
Considering both cities are some of the coldest in the world and the journey is 2000km, this really seems to be the result of poor planning. Part of the road contains driving over a frozen river, perhaps map apps should alert on crossings like this?
What's more interesting is that the vehicles that travel this road seem to not be in super great condition and for some reason I did not see any instance of chains.
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.
Article mentions "forced to change a route" but has no before/after image of the route and nothing to support the idea that this incident forced anybody to do anything with respect to the map.
Google Maps gives me the new, longer route from Yakutsk to Magadan (34 hr, 1161 mi) but I can recover the old route by adding a stop in Tomtor (40 hr, 1077 mi).
'forced' can sometimes be used synonymously with 'compelled by good sense'. Our context clues for this are: the tragedy of events that occurred, and possibility of worse outcomes.
This has been an issue with Google Maps for some time: being more optimistic than e.g. Apple Maps just so you use the service, as suggested by this article: https://arturgrabow.ski/2018/02/19/navigation-apps/
“Death by GPS” is an all too common problem when depending on tools like Google Maps too much to plan routes. This has been a common problem in the Mojave Desert in California: https://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/travel/article25... (Edit: James Kim actually used a paper map)
I will use Google Maps to plan routes, but I will also use common sense:
• I will look at the route on the map to become familiar with it
• I will use street view to see what each turn looks like (street view is also useful to see if the road is which needs a 4x4 with high clearance and pure rubber tires which do not use air to successfully drive)
• I will memorize the map (making simplifications as needed)
• I will then use the route
If one just lazily puts in a destination and depends on their phone to do all of the work for them, they can and will encounter problems. One time, I was with a buddy who does that, and the route given to us was horrible, so I just looked at him and said “Ignore what your phone says. I know how to get there.” It ended up he accidentally left “do not use freeways” enabled.
I remember using Waze for the first time many years back and it saved me a couple minutes off a rush hour commute by routing me through a residential area and past an elementary school with a bunch of kids running around.
Great, the map app shaved a couple of minutes for some drivers in a hurry by putting hundreds of kids' lives in danger.
Mapping apps ought to be subject to some sensible regulation to avoid cases like this and the one in OP.
I've seen some russian 4x4 videos through that area and further up north. You never travel alone in case anything goes wrong. You _never_ shut off your engine because it'll freeze and you won't be able to start it without making a fire underneath it (or heating it in other ways). You insulate your vehicle (double pane windows, other insulation). That area is no joke. Poor kids.
I had similar problem few days ago. No threat for life but serious threat for my car - the route suggested was full of very deep holes.
I've just tried to suggest a change, but as it happens often with Google documentation - the description of what to click matches nothing (there's no menu item labelled with the phrase from documentation - I use Polish version).
It was a Garmin and it was 15 years ago, but it attempted to send me down a legit ski slope near Lake Tahoe. Good times. Like it sent you through the parking area and behind the club house and everything. I’ve been a skeptic ever since.
Then again, I got a land cruiser 3 years ago (with a 24 gallon secondary gas tank) so if a gps says to try something these days I usually do!
Maybe the ski run it tried to take you on used to be a logging road.
My understanding is that most U.S. ski areas are on leased federal land formerly leased to logging companies, and the resorts go into the clear-cut areas, remove stumps, put in chair lifts, etc. The cat tracks are the remnants of the logging roads used to get the equipment in and trees out.
Google Maps always do that in Brazil, it's so annoying.
It recommends alternative routes to "save" you a couple of minutes. Dirt tracks, unmantained roads and sometimes danger neighborhoods (favelas).
They should fix the algo to prefer the main roads and streets. At least give a configurable threshold. It seems quite doable with all GPS data/street images they have.
Generally it's the other way around, with people in residential areas (of any wealth level) unhappy if cars are routed through the neighborhood, for obvious 'this is not supposed to be a through street' reasons.
To be fair this is unlike the case of leading one to a cliff ... it is in Siberia and even if they are on the main road accident happened. Perhaps if other people passed by it helped but for up to -70c ... they have to prepare for exception.
Google has many faults. But the story is not totally one sided.
It happened to me in Spain. I was driving back to the house we rented and ended up in the middle of a plowed field. Greeted by a cow and its bemused owner.
It took me some exercise to turn back, my nightmare was to have a puncture.
So yeah, when the road does not seem right follow your gut feelings.
I love how this article talks about the neglect of the process from Google and probably says something significant about russia's relationship with google in general and google maps at the cost of two of their own citizens needlessly dying by freezing to death and in the top rated comments is bicker about whether an old couple should be the one to pay for a gate to stop accidental trespassing.
I get the problems are both of the same origin, but the discussion has a much better chance of making progress and getting Google's attention which is hard to do when people's lives are at stake. Or when they have been lost directly due to their own oversights.
I'd never bet my life on any map. If it's really cold, after dark, or a remote location ... and if you don't have provisioning for everyone in case of vehicle failure ... it's a good idea to stay on well-travelled routes. Even then ... you never know ....
To get to the in-laws place for Xmas, I used to drive my family on a good highway, but it went through a 50-mile-wide frozen swamp with little traffic on it. Year after year. So risky ... suppose I hit a deer. Now I wonder why in the hell I did that.
All maps are going to have limits - computer maps just moreso - overtrust is always unwarranted.
I used to live in San Francisco and like to travel so I've used Google maps all around the world. While it is fairly accurate everywhere I strongly believe that the accuracy is proportional to your distance from Mountain View.
Replying to myself because I messed up my original comment. I meant to say that accuracy is inversely proportional to your distance from Mountain View.
Generally, the best way to find bike routes in Japan (or most countries) is to ask Google for car directions and avoid highways and toll roads. But this time, it drove me straight into the radioactive danger zones of the old Fukushima plant. You were only allowed on those roads if you went by car, as a radiation shield. So I got stuck in a dead end, in a literal ghost town, trying to hitchhike. Man, I still remember the frustration and anger. Weird adventure.
Google Maps is great at public transport directions: it seems to aggregate a lot of data and getting ridiculously good at estimations.
For road trips or hiking in sparsely populated areas, though, it’s treacherous to rely on automated routes. They make a path seem more reliable and well-known than it is.
A fairly straightforward and generalizable way of implementing a fix to issues like this could be by adding probability estimates and corresponding warnings to suggested routes. A long hike/ride through not-so-well-trodden path with scant data accumulated? Mark it, visibly.
Google maps pulled a plenty of tricks like this on me in Croatia, luckily our climate is warmer so you just end up wasting some time driving around, while navigation takes you to peoples backyards or suggests to take the turn right into the thick forest bushes, no road in sight whatsoever (probably there was some trail there long time ago, but got overtaken by woods many years ago). In certain areas this happens like all the time, rendering the navigation completely useless. They seem to slowly fix these glitches, but accent is on slowly...
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.
The HK Government produces some excellent paper maps that have a water resistant coating.
I bought mine in the General Post Office in Central, near IFC. There's also the maps shop at the junction of Nathan Road and Gascoigne Road in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon
Had 2 memorable experiences with Google Maps in foreign countries.
1st it took me to the Paris - Castellane it took me to the French Alps. Using a park road. I guess the shortest route between 2 points is up and over the mountain.
2nd time we were in Sicily and at some point we ended up driving through a golf course, and a herd of goats. It was super strange.
There was also a 3rd incidence in Malta. The route was down a walking path. The road got narrower and eventual just wide enough for 2 humans.
As someone who works in mapping in fire and rescue, I run into this problem constantly. It's fine for an established city, largely speaking. However, you get out into the country (and I use that term fairly loosely) and roads will be labeled incorrectly (I saw one that had the name of another road a mile off once, that was fun) and its idea of what is and is not vehicle-worth can be ... optimistic.
Reminds me of The Pump[0] which is a short film about a guy who tries to take a shortcut through California's desert. (you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/MdtZZ3NeQIE?t=47)
The Far East of Russia has always fascinated me, probably the only region of the globe I know very little about and can’t even imagine what must be like. Going to Russia would give me pause, let alone the Far East. It seems so sparse and empty, who are the people that live there and what must there Russian lives be like? Feels like technology doesn’t even exist there. Too cold, too isolated.
Last summer, in France, google maps tried to have me driving in hiking path in woods as a "shortcut" apparently. At one point it was even trying to have me to take a turn in trees directly, didn't look there was ever a path there.
Never used google maps for maps since, it's way too unreliable. The only use i have for it is to get business opening hours
Never trust Google maps blindly. I once let it direct me down some back roads to save a few minutes, while driving my gas guzzling SUV and towing a camper. What I didn't realize was that there were no gas stations along this alternate route. I was extremely lucky to make it to a station before going dry - the gas gauge had been on empty for miles.
Google maps also gives dangerous directions in several places in Iceland, directing traffic over old mountain roads that save a kilometer or two but take much longer because they are poorly maintained. It also makes no note of closed roads, though many roads in Iceland are only open seasonally, and this information is easily available.
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.
Google Maps data for most parts of Russia are very inaccurate. Even in cities there are ghost roads, missing roads, missing buildings and so on. Sometimes it's very annoying because some taxi operators use google data and some places just cannot be addressed because they are missing in the database.
Google the kinda map service that will route you through Valkenvania to save 2 minutes. Would I like to save two minutes?! Exit the freeway, take a million turns on unfamilair roads, and go through some po-dunk town that prob has a speed trap?! No thanks Google, that sounds like nuth'n but trouble.
"Google Maps" is just a piece of software- following it blindly, especially in remote places is insane. ~15 years a ago, Google Maps gave me same insane route up a ridge of a mountain side. I took a double check and revised my route.
When I was vacationing in Portugal Google Maps consistently sent us down the narrowest two-way single-lane roads that existed. Even after I explicitly picked the saner route it kept rerouting onto the steering wheel death grip roads.
And in some cities with grid layouts, Google Maps loves to route a zig-zag stair pattern with 15 turns to save you thirty seconds vs the obvious single turn L-shaped route.
I often wish the app had a "simplest route" option.
I drove from San Francisco to Panama City. It took 1.5 years. Never, ever use Google directions in Latin America outside of the major routes and cities unless you want to get stuck, lost or worse. That was the lesson.
It happened to me one in the desert, at night. I have blindly followed Google Maps, and I ended up without a signal, in a middle of no where. Luckily, I was not very far from the city.
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.
I'm sorry for their demise, but I'm kind of a fan of this 'feature' of Google Maps. Before covid, I spent 2 years on a motorbike (scooter) going all over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. I had some epic epic adventures into some deeply remote areas that I wouldn't have been able to find at all without the "help" of Google Maps giving me bad directions.
One of which was following what looked like a normal road out of town and ended up being a full day of crossing a mountain range, in the middle of nowhere, on a path where I had to push the motorbike up the hill for parts of it and cross a river half way through. Exhausting day, but amazing none the less.
You're a fan of a 'feature' that doesn't do what it should and puts people in danger. I get you just took an opportunity to post a 'look at me and my cool adventure' thing, but why don't you just adapt Chaosmonkey or something to choosing your route and enjoy. Don't imply this is a good thing or other people should follow your example.
I never used the word 'implied'. I completely understand that you felt compelled/entitled to piggyback your 'personal experience' on a tragedy. It's a shame you don't understand what a lack of morals that is, but you be you, right?
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN regardless of how bad another comment was or you feel it was. What you posted in this thread was beyond-the-pale guidelines breakage, and if you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you again. I don't want to do that, as you've posted a lot of good comments—but protecting the commons is more important.
Why would you need Google Maps for this? Start following a road in the general direction of where you are going and just guess on turns if you want an adventure.
TL;DR there is a road that goes through a really cold part of Russia (and we mean cold for even Russia). 2 young men were driving on it and their car got struck by a tree branch so it stopped working. One froze to death before help arrived the other is in critical condition.
The article appears to be almost devoid of information about Google.
My recollection from the time was that GPS mapping wasn't involved and, in fact, the Wikipedia article says: "Mrs. Kim told state police that they had used a paper road map, an account supported by the Oregon State Police, which reported that the Kims had used an official State of Oregon highway map. Mrs. Kim later recounted that, after they had been stuck for four days and were studying the map for help, both she and Mr. Kim noticed that a box in the corner of the map bore the message: "Not all Roads Advisable, Check Weather Conditions"."
The difference is you had to map your own route from the paper map. Now Google is suggesting the "best" route so its easy to blame this corporate entity and not the person who chose to follow instructions.
The road is in disuse. Russian Yandex recommended a much different route that was 3 hours longer, presumably because their developers knew something different about Russia than Google.
Yes, lack of local knowledge in Google Maps is often problematic, and Google aren't receptive to local governments requesting changes.
I lived near a gorge where there was a nice modern road alongside an old horse track that was only intended for use by the residents connected to it. It was technically two-way (as making it one way would annoy the residents who might want to go either up or down) but barely wide enough for one car. If you met another car halfway, you had to reverse until you got to a driveway you could go into and let the other car past.
At some point Google Maps' algorithm changed and started suggesting that everyone use the old road. There were multiple crashes, and the local government begged Google to deprioritise it, but their answer was basically "our algorithm is always right". Five years on, Google Maps will still suggest it, so the local government added big signs at each end advising drivers to ignore Google Maps and to use the main road.
Although they already weren't suggesting that route, the other map providers (Apple, Here, TomTom etc) contacted by the local government were happy to proactively add a flag to the road saying that it is for residents only - so it will only route using it if the source/destination is that road.
Wow the stupidity of HN commenters. Do you really think that Yandex developers minutely picked the route between 2 points or PERHAPS the shorter road in question was marked as impassable by whoever punched its GPS coordinates in the database? Do you really think developers take care of the whole product from start to finish? I pity your coworkers.
