Another near death by GPS story

GPS is No excuse nor will it fix STUPID

Another problem that people have is not setting their preferences correctly. It happened to me. I was camping in unfamiliar territory and needed to go to a store. I found it on the GPS and off I went. It was taking me through some small roads in a residential area and suddenly stopped and said proceed cross country. It was correct, I could see the shopping center about a half a mile away across a farm field. I had not told it to avoid off road in the preferences. That was not the fault of the GPS. Another example was my friend complaining that when going from our area of Maryland to Virginia it routed him up around the DC beltway but when coming back it routed him across the 301 bridge which is much shorter. That was easy I told him to go to preferences and turn off avoid tolls. From Maryland to Virginia you pay a toll but not from Virginia to Maryland. The GPS was only doing what he told it to do.

In their defense, they probably had the GPS mounted right smack in the middle of their windshield and couldn't see the "road closed" sign or the snow.

Stupid is as stupid does, any my goodness is there a LOT of stupid out driving on the road. I am constantly amazed at how many people do dumb things. As a police officer, I worked 13 years in patrol. People will blindly follow GPS and ignore signs and barriers on the ground. They will drive over curbs because GPS thinks there is a road there. They will try to drive through gates that are closed at certain hours, because GPS didn't tell them that the entrance was closed at certain times.

My favorite is still the taxpaying citizens who mount their GPS directly in front of them in the middle of their filed of vision on their car. You cannot possibly see the road through the GPS mounted there. At nighttime when it is dark and your vision is already impaired, they have the GPS on the brightest setting, right in their face. There isn't a chance that these drivers can see anything occurring outside of their car.

Incredible story of survival by this young lady, however an ounce of common sense could have prevented this story from ever happening in the first place.

I was driving around up there back in May of this year. And yes there is a really big sign and barricade across the road going into the park. The says "Road Closed for Winter". Now these people are a couple highly educated college types. There first problem the ability to read signs, which to them everyone else on the planet. So now we go looking for another road to get us in. It's kind of like putting up speed limit signs on our highways. I surely don't know the states even bother, no body reads them. The old saying is: "You can't fix Stupid". Now I'm hoping that you ever came and got them out sent them a nice big bill. And maybe next time they'll learn. But I doubt it.

My guess on that is this: the gps directed them onto the forest road well before that gate. They may never have seen the sign. My Rand McNally mapbook shows a unpaved road coming off of Hwy 89 north of Jacobs Lake and intersecting 67 down near the park entry station. I just looked at 40 or 50 maps online and none of them show the unpaved roads.

I know the park has such a map because we were using it and wanted to go to the Tuweep overlook. Not being a fool I checked with the ranger at Jacobs Lake USFS station and was warned away since that road was reported impassable even for 4WD vehicles. We went on the house rock trail instead.

Whether it's a steering wheel, or a control yoke or a scalpel, in a human's hand,....sooner or later humans will screw it up. They're just not as safety conscious as we are,....right?

wa8yxm wrote:
GPS gives you only a few things. Your location (Lat/Long/Alt), Time of day, And that is all. Your GPS receiver then computers velocity (Direction and speed) vectors. and feeds the above to a mapping program.

While basically correct, it is in fact rather more complex than that. The satellites basically just broadcast time, very very precisely synchronized to each other, and their exact positions and orbits. The GPS receiver can compare the relative time it sees in the signals with respect to each other to determine the difference in distance between it and the various satellites (the times varying because radio signals travel at the speed of light, so further ones take longer to arrive) and, given enough of these differences, determine its position by triangulation.

A GPS receiver can also compare the relative frequency shift of the signals due to the doppler effect and so figure its relative velocity to the various satellites. From this, it's possible to determine velocity independently from the position. Good GPS chipsets use the velocity thus computed to produce a more accurate position estimate.

What is absolutely true, and your main point, is that the GPS system does not tell you where the roads are or where your destination is or what way you should drive to get there. That's all in the programming of the GPS unit and its databases, and imperfections with either one can lead to it giving nonsensical or dangerous advice. Usually when it tells one to drive through a school or across a field it's because it's map database has a road listed there--possibly one that officially exists per government records, despite there being trees and fences and buildings in the way.

I find a GPS unit to be a very handy servant but oftentimes a very poor master.

I find it amazing how this thread is so dramatically negative about the use of a GPS. Where are the names of the manufacturers of the units and the programmers that sell these death machines. I think most of the references are a friend of a friend stories and there are no references to the hundreds of millions of people successfully using a GPS.

There are many members of these forums that say they rely almost entirely on various electronic gadgets for planning their trips and decry the use of paper maps. As was mentioned in replies, you need to use your common sense first, don't blame the GPS for these silly people who court death on their own.

The last story I read was about the lady that walked 26 miles because the gps took them to a dirt muddy road. Her husband said she was an intelligent women.

Not really if the story was true. common sense as Bishop said is more important that being smart in My mind. We had a new GPS that wanted us to turn off 58 going east from Bakersfeild but make a long route up and back to 58. Did not fool us because we had an idea where we were headed. That GPS was replaced and a new one was waiting for us when we arrived in Az. We have to think to be safe. Happy New Year. looking for a new beginning.

chevman

yeah GPS is a great tool but you still need common sense. It has taken down a back dirt road turned onto a private drive and I love to driving in the grass when it hasn't been updated. Like everything you need to still use what god gave you between those handles mom's use to keep you in line as a child, which is why my hearing isn't great. LOL