Post by Morreion on May 4, 2016 13:54:15 GMT -5
Death by GPS (Ars Technica)
Why do we follow digital maps into dodgy places?
Why do we follow digital maps into dodgy places?
...The park rangers at Death Valley National Park in California call it “death by GPS.” It describes what happens when your GPS fails you, not by being wrong, exactly, but often by being too right. It does such a good job of computing the most direct route from Point A to Point B that it takes you down roads which barely exist, or were used at one time and abandoned, or are not suitable for your car, or which require all kinds of local knowledge that would make you aware that making that turn is bad news.
Enlarge / This feature is a book excerpt from the forthcoming Pinpoint by Greg Milner.
Death Valley’s vast arid landscape and temperature extremes make it a particularly dangerous place to rely on GPS. In the summer of 2009, Alicia Sanchez, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse, was driving through the park with her six-year-old son, Carlos, when her GPS directed her onto a vaguely defined road that she followed for 20 miles, unaware that it had no outlet. A week later, a ranger discovered Sanchez’s Jeep, buried in sand up to its axles, with sos spelled out in medical tape on the windshield. “She came running toward me and collapsed in my arms,” the ranger wrote in a report. “Her lips were very dry and chapped with bleeding blisters and her tongue appeared to be swollen with very little saliva formation. I walked over to the Jeep and looked inside. I saw a boy slumped in the front seat with obvious signs of death.” Mother and son had wandered over ten miles of desert in search of water, and had resorted to drinking their urine. They had tried to share a Pop-Tart a few days earlier, but their mouths were too dry to swallow. As he lay dying, Carlos grew delirious, telling his mother he was “speaking to my grandfather in heaven.”
Most death-by-GPS incidents do not involve actual deaths—or even serious injuries. They are accidents or accidental journeys brought about by an uncritical acceptance of turn-by-turn commands: the Japanese tourists in Australia who drove their car into the ocean while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island from the mainland; the man who drove his BMW down a narrow path in a village in Yorkshire, England, and nearly over a cliff; the woman in Bellevue, Washington, who drove her car into a lake that their GPS said was a road; the Swedish couple who asked GPS to guide them to the Mediterranean island of Capri, but instead arrived at the Italian industrial town of Carpi; the elderly woman in Belgium who tried to use GPS to guide her to her home, 90 miles away, but instead drove hundreds of miles to Zagreb, only realizing her mistake when she noticed the street signs were in Croatian.
Enlarge / This feature is a book excerpt from the forthcoming Pinpoint by Greg Milner.
Death Valley’s vast arid landscape and temperature extremes make it a particularly dangerous place to rely on GPS. In the summer of 2009, Alicia Sanchez, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse, was driving through the park with her six-year-old son, Carlos, when her GPS directed her onto a vaguely defined road that she followed for 20 miles, unaware that it had no outlet. A week later, a ranger discovered Sanchez’s Jeep, buried in sand up to its axles, with sos spelled out in medical tape on the windshield. “She came running toward me and collapsed in my arms,” the ranger wrote in a report. “Her lips were very dry and chapped with bleeding blisters and her tongue appeared to be swollen with very little saliva formation. I walked over to the Jeep and looked inside. I saw a boy slumped in the front seat with obvious signs of death.” Mother and son had wandered over ten miles of desert in search of water, and had resorted to drinking their urine. They had tried to share a Pop-Tart a few days earlier, but their mouths were too dry to swallow. As he lay dying, Carlos grew delirious, telling his mother he was “speaking to my grandfather in heaven.”
Most death-by-GPS incidents do not involve actual deaths—or even serious injuries. They are accidents or accidental journeys brought about by an uncritical acceptance of turn-by-turn commands: the Japanese tourists in Australia who drove their car into the ocean while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island from the mainland; the man who drove his BMW down a narrow path in a village in Yorkshire, England, and nearly over a cliff; the woman in Bellevue, Washington, who drove her car into a lake that their GPS said was a road; the Swedish couple who asked GPS to guide them to the Mediterranean island of Capri, but instead arrived at the Italian industrial town of Carpi; the elderly woman in Belgium who tried to use GPS to guide her to her home, 90 miles away, but instead drove hundreds of miles to Zagreb, only realizing her mistake when she noticed the street signs were in Croatian.
