Death by GPS
By Rocky Thompson on January 31st, 2011
It seems there are some rough roads through Death Valley that have been popping up in GPS units for the past several years, and at least a few people have followed these directions to their deaths. In one sad case in August of 2009, a woman got her Jeep stuck for 6 days after blindly following her GPS directions and her kid died before anyone happened upon her.
One case happened last summer, when visitors arriving from the west on Highway 190 told their GPS to take them to Scotty’s Castle, a popular tourist destination at the north end of the park, which is easily accessible by paved road.
Instead, the unit directed them over an unpaved, winding, washboard road toward Saline Valley, where they turned right onto an even rougher four-wheel-drive road and became stuck near a remote abandoned mine site called Lippincott.
It’s happened several times when drivers ignore commonsense and push on, with some blind confidence that they’re heading the right way. The ranger who discovered all the closed and non-existent roads appearing on GPS units contacted the companies to try to get them to update their maps and remove impassable routes. Google, surprisingly was the worst to work with. It took him a year to get them to update their maps, while TomTom did it over the phone for him.
Tags: death valley, gps
Google got me pretty good once. I was just going to a parking lot on the edge of Shenandoah NP and it decided to send me down what I can only imagine was either a fire road or a 4×4 shortcut that some idiot actually named and mapped. My little Ford Focus handled it like a champ, though, and I’ll admit it was kind of exciting. But I found a better way back.
I’ve requested five corrections to incorrect Google Maps data in my town, all of which have been corrected within a month. Perhaps Google doesn’t like to talk over the phone. (shrug)