Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

https://www.popsci.com/technology/google-maps-australia-tourists-stranded/

by geox • 2 years ago

31 45 2 years ago

bell-cot4• 2 years ago

German tourists...who did make it out alive.

Recalling a family of German tourists in America, who sadly did not - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans

(And if you've not read the tale, and have some spare time, this is a classic - https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu... )

BonoboIO2• 2 years ago

I have no problem when people kill themself because of their own stupidity, but killing your own children, that it is a tragedy.

bell-cot4• 2 years ago

I would not be so harsh. They had limited resources, no familiarity whatever with how unforgiving and lethal the wilderness of the American West can be, and made what the local search & rescue folks seem to regard a series of "reasonable, but ultimately tragic" assumptions & decisions.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 2 years ago

I thought we stopped blaming the computer for idiot drivers 20 years ago when it was Garmin and Tom Tom rather than Google.

blitzar• 2 years ago

The darwinian process of natural selection took care of things 20 years ago. Without those to tell the tales and after a brief period of time the lessons of past generations were forgotten.

slow_typist• 2 years ago

Such occurrences are so common today, there is even a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS

It is a combination of bad planning and bad judgement that wouldn’t kill you in urban areas (where ambulance response time is below 10 minutes) but can get very dangerous in remote areas in no time. The couple has hopefully learned their lesson. They were very lucky.

chgs• 2 years ago

I remember going to a town marked on a rand mcnally map in British Columbia once, it was small but clearly a settlement.

This was before the days of smartphone maps

Roads became unpaved, then turned into dirt tracks, then eventually little more than grass.

Eventually got there and there was a single ruin of a shed next to a railway line. There had never been a settlement there - I suspect it was a copyright trap.

We had a compass, a fix on our location, and enough to keep warm and fed and were less than a day’s walk from the main road, but the point is people got lost and misdirected by maps well before the days of GPS and google maps.

Arnt• 2 years ago

I'm curious — why did you want to go there in the first place?

cqqxo4zV46cp3• 2 years ago

Why go anywhere when you’re just gonna end up back home again!? /s

bell-cot4• 2 years ago

I don't know Canadian rail history, but in the U.S. I'd suspect that the settlement did exist - at least in the RR's marketing plans. And maybe in some dusty legal paperwork, too. And at some point there might even have been a RR work camp, or logging camp, or some such.

omega3• 2 years ago

It looks like indeed there is no overland road to Bamaga.

defrost• 2 years ago

Sure there's a road there ... it's just your typical northern Australian, specifically Cape York type road .. they can get a bit extreme for the unwary.

https://youtu.be/l_sY-gp_pqg?t=228

If you hit such roads in the wet you're going to get bogged - and extracting yourself from wheel deep mud is an arcane artform.

Fishing & 4WDing in West Cape York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB3ia158GOI

billyruffian2• 2 years ago

I live on an old farm. I'm connected to a neighbour by a track that is narrow, has a steep drop with no barrier and a ford at the bottom. After decent rain, the ford is more like a full-blown river. It is a public footpath but otherwise is only suitable for quads or farm machinery. There's no way of turning around when you're committed. There is not a road or bridleway, there is no public access unless on foot.

At some point, presumably from satellite imagery, Google decided this was a road.

Now google maps regularly directs folk down my private drive and on to the track where they have a terrifying journey or end up having to be towed by a tractor. No amount of 'report a problem' tickets have resolved this and it's been going on for years now.

afr0ck3• 2 years ago

Why don't you install a gate with a warning?

L_226• 2 years ago

why don't you pay money to fix someone else's mistake?

billyruffian2• 2 years ago

There is a gate, with a warning. That stops most of the delivery drivers. Tourists, not so much.

pvaldes• 2 years ago

May I suggest to create a "mine field, you will die" banner in your property with stones big enough to be picked by the satellite photo in the next update?

Or you may prefer a tasteful "sea crocodile sanctuary" traffic signal (Extra points if you draw the crocodile eating a tourist holding a beer and wearing Tyrolean pants).

BonoboIO2• 2 years ago

As a non native speaker, at First I thought to myself „why is there a ford (car) at the bottom of the drop“ :D

bell-cot4• 2 years ago

Reminds me of one of my dad's old stories - about a prosperous farmer, who lived on a dirt road. The road had a horrible mud hole a hundred yard or so beyond the farmer's barn.

By day, his farm work was forever being interrupted by optimists and city folks, who had to offer him several dollars to get him to haul their motor cars out of the mud hole. (Back then, several dollars was serious money.)

By night, he never got enough sleep - he was too busy hauling water up from the river, to refresh the mud hole.

burrish• 2 years ago

This got me good lmao

Two4• 2 years ago

It may be worth sending them a lawyer's letter threatening to sue for costs and damages (or whatever the lawyer says) unless they fix the issue. It's faster and easier and cheaper for them to placate you than to even send a lawyer's letter back. You don't have to follow through, necessarily - just poke them in the face rather than the ass.

waste_monk• 2 years ago

No amount of 'report a problem' tickets have resolved this and it's been going on for years now.

Have you tried submitting a correction to the map itself [1] [2]? It may take a while (not sure about Google Maps, but I submitted some corrections to OpenStreetMap a while ago and it took a couple of months before they were reflected in my Garmin GPS) but hopefully should eventually resolve the problem.

Alternatively, there are other means of manipulating Google Maps, such as fake traffic jams [3] that will dynamically reroute traffic around it.

[1] https://support.google.com/maps/answer/10271004?hl=en&co=GEN...

[2] https://support.google.com/maps/thread/124271401/how-to-i-ge...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-ar...

Pinus• 2 years ago

I’m not familiar with modern (or any, for that matter...) car navigation systems. Do they have a big "NO!" button? The ones I have seen seemed very intent on planning one route, and then following that, no matter what. If you could not make a turn because it was blocked by some road works or whatever, the satnav would just keep trying to direct you back to that point. It would have been nice with a big NO/UNABLE button to push to get an alternative route.

z500• 2 years ago

I just keep going and tell the GPS to deal with it until it stops chiming at me and finds a new route

gthrow12345• 2 years ago

There is actually the opposite problem now with Google Maps, where you'll be traveling happily on a route and it will tell you "we found a route that's 20 seconds faster by taking you down a road you want to avoid, take your eyes off the road to press a button on your phone immediately or else we're swapping you to it!"

And even if you're at a place where you can safely hit the button, it keeps trying to do it over and over again every time you pass a new exit that can take you to the new route it's trying to foist on you.

As far as I can tell there's no way to make it opt-in, configure it so that it only swaps you if it's a big time savings, or turn it off completely. The only suggestion I find online is to turn off mobile data which means that you then lose real-time traffic updates entirely.

korginator• 2 years ago

The quality of google maps routing has become terrible over the past few years. I sometimes visit a few Indian cities on work. There are many places that you can walk to. Interestingly, Apple maps on my iPhone shows me at least 2-3 good walking routes, while google maps tries to get me killed on busy thoroughfares or tells me to walk across eight lanes of peak-hour traffic.

When taking a cab, google maps increasingly routes me through narrow roads, streets that can only accommodate a bike, or the wrong way in one-way roads. Apple maps usually gets it right. Sometimes google routes are just plain wrong - it takes me to the wrong destination - and I'm left scratching my head as to how the heck any algorithm that worked earlier could do this now.

I remember a time when Google maps was not this terrible.

yummypaint• 2 years ago

A few years ago google maps told my wife and I to "use the left lane to turn right" at an intersection of major 5 lane roads. The diagram even showed a car in the far left turn lane making a suicidal right across all the traffic. I couldn't believe it. Not a new road either.

I can understand a bad sequence of directions emerging from the process, but issuing an individual instruction that on it's face is dangerous and wrong?

cqqxo4zV46cp3• 2 years ago

Jumping in before someone from Melbourne tells you about hook turns.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Google here routinely sends people on really bad tracks you have a hard time turning around or backing around from unless you are experienced with/on them and with the car you are driving. People this happens to are usually tourists with rental cars so they don't know the terrain or the car. When they turn to ask for help I often ask how you thought it was a good idea to get of the actual road with signs and asphalt and got onto the dirt track that seems to be made of loose stones and sand and goes on a 20+ degrees incline into somewhere you cannot see. Didn't you look on the map before you went right, to see if there even is anything there. Google said they had to go there even though most of these paths don't go anywhere... Did they use to? I don't know but not the past 15 years I have lived here. It's weird.

Also, reminds me of: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/man-fr...

kuchenbecker• 2 years ago

I live in the bay area and routinely get told to go down a one-way mountain road without cell service. If there was cell service Google would know they created a traffic jam.

neom• 2 years ago

Stories like this always remind me of when I first moved from my small town to the big city. I did so with another guy from my town who was going to the same college as I was. It's an 18-hour drive to the town I went to college in... So my buddy and I decide to go together, and his dad will drive us in their truck. This was also over 20 years ago. The morning of they show up, we load up, say goodbye to my family, and off we go! About 10 minutes in my buddy giddily said to me "It's only going to take us 14 hours! We found a shortcut!" - and he pulls out 2 pages of printed-out MapQuest instructions.

...26 hours later and various 6ft wide logging paths later, we arrived at college!

tekla• 2 years ago

The world is so easy and automated that people turn their brains off (or maybe didn't even have on in the first place) and don't have a "wait this doesn't seem right" reflex.

Tabular-Iceberg• 2 years ago

Is it really the fault of Google Maps for not reporting the current mud status?

It feels pretty far out of its scope.

Tourists stranded in Australian wilderness following faulty Google Maps route

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