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.
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.