GPS instructions nearly costs woman her life.

[Liberal_in_LA]

GPS Mistake Nearly Costs Woman Her Life
FOX8.com Staff Writer
11:49 AM EST, March 3, 2010


LEETONIA, Ohio - A northeast Ohio woman was nearly killed because she was following erroneous directions generated by the GPS device in her vehicle, Fox 8 News reports.

The 64-year-old Youngstown-area woman was driving in Columbiana County when the GPS led her onto a set of railroad tracks as a train was approaching.

A police officer spotted the woman's car and rushed to help. First, he called authorities in an attempt to get the locomotive stopped, but it was too late. He then decided to quickly pull the woman out of her car.

"They went over to a safe area," Leetonia Police Chief John Soldano said. "The train came and rear-ended the vehicle and pretty much totaled (it)."

The Ohio State Highway Patrol continues to investigate the accident. Luckily, nobody was injured

http://www.fox8.com/news/wjw-news-ohio-leetonia-gps-mistake-train-accident,0,6527668.story

(she's not getting a lot of sympathy from readers)

[leftofcool]

1. MY GPS doesn't tell me to stop at a RR crossing, it assumes I know this.

[elehhhhna]

35. ssounds like it had her driving on the train tracks. she shouldn't drive at all

if she's that dopey. 100 bucks says she's a teabagger.

[KingFlorez]

2. She was lacking some common sense here

The GPS couldn't make her car roll onto the tracks.

[Codeine]

3. She didn't see the tracks?

Would she have driven off a cliff had the GPS told her to?

Proof positive that some people simply should not be allowed to operate motor vehicles.

[shawcomm]

20. Some guy did.

He drove right off a cliff and I don't recall how, they figured out he was following his GPS. And a couple almost did too, recently. WTH is wrong with people?

[TheWraith]

31. Bingo. Blame the user, not the tools.

A GPS receiver is a great thing, but it has certain limitations. Like the fact that it's only accurate to within a certain margin of error, so if two things are side by side it might think you were on one and not the other. Or the fact that the directions are only as good as the information put in to the map. It's a driving AID, not a replacement for the human brain.

[Blue-Jay]

33. My GPS wanted me to go the wrong way on a one-way street.

Thankfully, there were two big "Do Not Enter" signs. So I did not enter.

A GPS is good at getting you where you want to go, but you still need to use a little common sense.

So, yes, I blame the driver.

[MrCoffee]

4. Nor sympathy from me

This makes no sense. Did the GPS instruct her to turn ONTO a set of train tracks? Was she that blindly obedient to the GPS that she didn't look for a train?

How is it "erroneous directions" that caused this moron to stop on train tracks?

[superduperfarleft]

5. .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yyKrS8jwSY

[JBoy]

16. LOL. That's the episode I was thinking of.

There's a lake there!

The machine knows where it's going!

[LiberalFighter]

19. I wonder how many are stupid enough to do that? Geesh!!

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. Like the case of the guy who put his van on cruise control...

then went into the back to fix a drink.

[liberalhistorian]

12. Holy shit, are you kidding me?

That actually happened? Someone seriously thought that the car drove itself on cruise control? I know people can be pretty fucking stupid and they prove it every day all over the world, but still................

So, what happened to him?

[pitohui]

23. no that's a joke from the early 1980s when cruise control first became widespread

in its original telling i heard it abt the arab oil shiek who lands in houston, decides to buy himself a fancy van complete w. cruise control and fridge full of beer in the back -- that's an OLD joke!!!

it is apocryphal, i doubt it ever actually happened to a real person but if it did, "what happened to him" is lost in the decades of time that has passed

[Ms. Toad]

30. Urban legend (i.e. not true)

http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp

[shawcomm]

21. haha

yeah, that one is hilarious. Must have thought he was George Jetson. :rofl:

[redwitch]

36. Cruise control isn't another name for auto pilot?

Huh.

[NJmaverick]

7. My GPS once said I was driving in the middle of the Delaware River

I didn't jump out of my car and try to swim to shore.

[jobycom]

11. Dumbass.

If you'd jumped, you couldn've sued for millions! :rofl:

[MineralMan]

8. Uh...the GPS can't see. The driver can.

What a maroon!

[Heddi]

9. I had a guy in the ER a few months ago with a GPS-related accident

Of course, he blames it on the GPS...I blame it on operator error and the admitted "few beers" and 4 glasses of wine he had at dinner...

Anyway

So he is one of the 10,000,000,000,000,000 elderly out-of-towners that hole up in Florida every winter. He is unfamiliar with the area. He rents a car, plays some golf and drinks some beers. Then goes to dinner and has 4 glasses of wine. Gets in the car half toasted, in an unfamiliar setting, turns on GPS and drives back to His condo (boca palms? ciega key? boca key? palm ciega? ciega palms?). The GPS tells him to turn left....so he does....and goes into a fucking ditch.

I ask him "did you see a road where it said to turn left?" no, it said to turn left so I did....

moron.

[jobycom]

10. I've gotten in some wierd situations with GPS, but ultimately I'm the one who got me into them.

I mean, she could see the train track, right?

My favorite was the time I let the GPS lead me the "shortest" route to a a park here in Texas. I wound up on a dirt road that crossed a creek--no bridge, not even a low water crossing, just a track through the center of the creek. I decided to go for it--I mean, one little creek with about a foot of water wasn't going to drown me or my car. Made it across fine, though a bit bumpy. About a mile further, it wove back across the creek. By now I'm half a mile from where I was going, and about 30 miles away if I went back and took the main road. What the heck, I risked it. The creek, called Sandy Creek because it is very wide and shallow and full of sand, had been crossed a lot--you could see the tire tracks. Also, we had passed others on the road, so it couldn't be bad, right?

So halfway across the sandbar the car hits a soft patch and sticks. I tried to rock it back out of the rut, and got the other wheel stuck. Luckily the car was out of the water, just stuck on a sand bar in the middle of a fifty foot wide creek.

The other people I passed finally caught up to me, and after laughing their asses off, pushed me out. They also thanked me. They were following their GPS, had never been on the road, and felt sure they'd have gotten stuck if they hadn't seen me stuck already. :rofl: So much for assuming others know more than me.

So I cursed the GPS mightily, but really, you'd think a 40+ year old man who grew up on dirt roads would have more sense than a distant satellite, right?

Glad the woman was okay. Wouldn't make light of it if she hadn't been. :(

[mike_c]

13. I had to look just to see if it was my ex....

She's from there. I will say nothing more.

[liberalhistorian]

17. Snicker. Now, now, now, that's

not very nice, Mike. :spank:

But, given that, as you know, I know a few details about her, that wouldn't have been a surprise had it been her. LOL

[mike_c]

40. lol....

Yeah. I will continue to say nothing more. :hi:

[petronius]

14. My GPS (a hand-held, not dashboard) mapset includes dirt roads

and farm roads and all kinds of less-passable features. You know what I do? I don't drive there... :eyes:

I don't understand why people are so willing to cede all responsibility to an electronic device or a number on a computer screen. Is the concept of critical thinking completely dead these days?

[liberalhistorian]

18. It may not be totally dead, but it's sure getting there.

And just wait until those students subjected to the rote teach-to-the-test-and-nothing-else No Child Left Behind come of age and start running things. We ain't seen nothing yet.

[petronius]

27. I'm seeing them in my college classes, that's for sure. I don't know if it's

more common than in the past, but I frequently have students hand me answer that are absolutely impossible - for example, the area of our campus is not 500,000 square miles, I don't care what number the GIS gave you...

[liberalhistorian]

15. She ain't gonna get much sympathy from me, either, and

for obvious reasons. You don't just blindly follow techno-gadgets, I don't care how whiz-bang they are. They still rely at least somewhat on human operations. You especially don't just drive onto a fucking raidroad track, with an approaching train, just because some fucking whiz-bang techno-gadget tells you to do so.

[pitohui]

22. sorry sounds like being vision impaired nearly cost the woman her life, not the GPS

recently, in a foreign land, the GPS informed that i was driving across a broad river, but i decided to go w. the evidence of my eyes and simple common sense -- the river had once been there, clearly, but it had dried up and was no more -- the GPS data base was out of date...shit happens...a GPS does not replace the necessity to use your own eyes

if a woman is so vision impaired that she is unable to see traintracks COMPLETE WITH ONCOMING TRAIN, a bad GPS program is the least of her problems, she needs to be banned from driving

i have an older relative who is all but blind, who insists on driving, i just hope someone pulls her license before she kills herself or somebody else

if you can no longer tell when a fucking TRAIN is headed your way, you are criminally irresponsible to be at the wheel of a car

[LisaM]

24. I have a friend who, I swear, looks at the GPS as much as the road

she loves tech gadgets (she's fairly young) and uses them for everything. I was driving with her once when she put it on and it was a little unnerving, to say the least.

Of course people should be looking at the road - I'm not going to dispute that - but when they put something that makes it look like you're driving in a video game in your car, incidents are going to occur. I don't like GPS systems and won't use them, because it's really easy to start looking at the map instead of the road (I know my limitations in this regard).

It's like other forms of distracted driving, IMO. As more and more people have them, we'll see more incidents like this (and I'll bet there are already more than are being reported).

It's real easy to lay into a 64-year old woman who probably panicked than think that maybe we shouldn't have interactive road maps in our cars drawing attention away from the road.

[LeftyMom]

29. I put mine on audible instructions and leave it in a compartment on the dash.

I can pull it out easily enough if I need to look at a map, I get driving directions, and everybody wins. If my son is with me I hand it to him and let him navigate. Not knowing where the hell I am is much more distracting than the GPS, that's for sure.

There's definitely a place for it, and used properly it's not dangerous. Driving while dumb is dangerous, with or without any electronics.

[LisaM]

42. Your system sounds about right

I do think there's a place for them - who hasn't been lost out on some country road at night? The idea of hiding the map and listening to the instructions is good.

[LiberalFighter]

25. Elderly need warnings about the device.

Maybe GPS should provide different instructions for the elderly when going thru the setup process.

[Dr.Phool]

26. I had a GPS that gave me bad directions twice.

It was just a test run. I knew where I was going, and it was sending me the opposite direction.

I took it back to Best Buy, and they checked it out in the back room, and said it worked fine. They then charged me a $30.00 (15%)restocking fee because I wouldn't exchange it.

That was two years ago, I haven't shopped there since.

[hlthe2b]

28. Foolish, but GPS (and mapquest, for that matter)... have frequently

given me bad directions--- telling me to go the wrong way on a one-way street or trying to send me to a similarly named street in a residential neighborhood. There is a certain amount of error in these things...

[TreasonousBastard]

32. Train must been moving pretty slowly if the cop had time to...

make phone calls and then pull her out of the car. Or it was really far way. Either way, though, good chance she didn't see or hear it, since it was behind her.

There are plenty of grade crossings in rural areas that just aren't so clear, and don't have gates or lights. Plenty of tracks have "Railroad Avenues" running right next to them, too.

So, yeah, it's easy to sit back and blame the woman for being stupid, but there's not one person here who couldn't ever be in a similar situation and get fouled up somehow.

[Silver Swan]

34. A similar thing happened to my former spouse.

He ended up on railroad tracks by obeying his GPS. Fortunately, he realized that it couldn't be right before any trains came by.

[WVRICK13]

37. The Blind Should Not Drive

even with a GPS unit. Driving by brail is not only dangerous it is hard on your fingertips.

[ProgressOnTheMove]

38. More wiser to use the offline route planner if using like tomtom on ifone...

GPS is good but it shouldn't be seen as life and death accurate.

[slutticus]

39. GPS is not a replacement for situational awareness.

Tho I'll admit, I've had some lapses while using my GPS.

[Orsino]

41. I'll bet the GPS failed to balance her checkbook, too.

Stupid GPS.