Common sense doesn't necessarily come into play when your driving through unfamiliar territory, which is what most people use GPS for. If you aren't already familiar with the roads your travelling, no amount of common sense is going to tell you that you have a bad map or the GPS is wrong until it's too late. I'm sure this narrow road only got too narrow to traverse once the truck drivers had already traveled a good ways down it.
Since I have a terrible sense of direction and rely heavily on maps, MapQuest, and occasionally directions from strangers, I have a lot of sympathy for the people who drove down a too-narrow road on the instructions of their GPS and got stuck.
People who drive off piers, though (where is that story? I couldn't find it) -- they have no excuse.
Looks like some of the links have disappeared, but related stories are still available here (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/offbeat/2007/01/german_automatons_blame_gps.html) and here. (http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=81054)
What I find fascinating is when people let the instructions override their common sense--driving around road closed signs, or making u-turns on highways, simply because they were prompted to do so.
Having worked in the I/T industry for twenty years, I know how easy it is to get things fouled-up. I'm one of those persons who always gets two independent sets of directions for a trip and compares them against each other. If they don't match, I go for a tiebreaker.
I learned that lesson years ago, when Hertz's automatic directions printing system gave me precise turn by turn instructions to my hotel-- which instead led to a seedy part of town, at 2AM no less. I drove away, found a payphone (ah, the days before cell phones) and called my hotel to figure out where I really needed to be.
When I returned the car to Hertz I complained, only to find out that they'd known for a while that their system had problems, where a number of their pre-programmed destinations had been input with the right street addresses but wrong towns. They were sure it would be fixed...eventually.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 04:44 pm (UTC)Common sense doesn't necessarily come into play when your driving through unfamiliar territory, which is what most people use GPS for. If you aren't already familiar with the roads your travelling, no amount of common sense is going to tell you that you have a bad map or the GPS is wrong until it's too late. I'm sure this narrow road only got too narrow to traverse once the truck drivers had already traveled a good ways down it.
Since I have a terrible sense of direction and rely heavily on maps, MapQuest, and occasionally directions from strangers, I have a lot of sympathy for the people who drove down a too-narrow road on the instructions of their GPS and got stuck.
People who drive off piers, though (where is that story? I couldn't find it) -- they have no excuse.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 06:15 pm (UTC)What I find fascinating is when people let the instructions override their common sense--driving around road closed signs, or making u-turns on highways, simply because they were prompted to do so.
Having worked in the I/T industry for twenty years, I know how easy it is to get things fouled-up. I'm one of those persons who always gets two independent sets of directions for a trip and compares them against each other. If they don't match, I go for a tiebreaker.
I learned that lesson years ago, when Hertz's automatic directions printing system gave me precise turn by turn instructions to my hotel-- which instead led to a seedy part of town, at 2AM no less. I drove away, found a payphone (ah, the days before cell phones) and called my hotel to figure out where I really needed to be.
When I returned the car to Hertz I complained, only to find out that they'd known for a while that their system had problems, where a number of their pre-programmed destinations had been input with the right street addresses but wrong towns. They were sure it would be fixed...eventually.