I just completed a series of bus tours to various Civil War battlefields, mostly in Virginia, where the road network has been largely extant for 200 years.
The GPS steered us wrong on
every single trip, at least once. Some of those battlefields, and the roads that feed into them (there is always a series of converging roads around a battlefield), I know well enough to draw from memory, and there would be times when I would be shouting at the driver and the GPS, "no, no, no! The GPS is wrong!" But the driver, rightly concerned with our safety, often would not have time to make a correction before our turn was behind us. So we wound up making
a lot of U-turns.
On at least one occasion, the GPS was wrong because a bypass road built five years ago was only available as a paid update to the GPS content. I won that fight, and the GPS showed us splashing through a swamp at 55 mph.
On other occasions, we tried to use the GPS to get us to positions we wanted to see and it couldn't get us there, while following the maps of
Jed Hotchkiss, 150 year-old maps, took us right to them. Eventually I started making a Hotchkiss map the cover of every handout I made, and I used them on every trip, trying to stay ahead of the GPS curveballs. Good old Jed really came through for us.
Part of the problem is us. It's complicated and time consuming to plot a route which forces the GPS to take us the way we want to go, so on-the-fly decisions by us invariably force the GPS to default to the "best" route rather than the correct one. The GPS seems to have no problem choosing a point 500 meters away on the far side of a river as the "best" it can do. It clearly has different objectives, seeking simplicity and safety with a limited data set, while we have actual places we want to go.
After that experience I have no problem whatsoever pointing out several things:
* The GPS is an excellent
supplement to a capable navigator who knows the roads and can read maps. But it is not reliable enough on its own to replace a human navigator.
* An alarming proportion of people cannot read maps at all, either paper OR GPS. This seems to have something to do with the layout of our brains, and you are either a map reader or you are not. Apparently the US Army has been aware of this phenomenon for decades, and according to James Dunnigan, they think one out of three people are hopelessly unteachable. If you're one of those people, ADMIT IT! There is no shame in not being able to read a map. That's just how you are, and if you try to fake it with a GPS, you're going to fail and take everyone else with you.
* The second you suspect your GPS is steering you wrong,
pull over immediately at the first safe place you find. Because the GPS chooses the fastest and most efficient routes, you can completely leave the area you want to be in within minutes. You must be safely parked to accurately and reliably read a map or to reprogram the GPS.
* Hey! Stop holding that god damned cell phone to your ear when you're driving! You've almost killed me ten times this year already.
You are the real GPS, and driving requires your full attention at all times.
So that's what I think. I hope some of you will take my advice and profit from it. If something I've said sounds incorrect, I'd appreciate it if you'd call me out on it. This is a safety issue and I won't mind being wrong if what I say can be corrected.