Damn GPS Plotting

NWLondoner

Last week I plotted a course on bikeroutetoaster for a circular route from my home to Luton Airport and back.

All was going well until the road that I was following turned into a bloody bridal way!!!. The road was Edgwarebury Lane.

I tried to persist but the road looked like it had been shelled by the Russian Army by the amount of large potholes everywhere. I had to turn back and my motivation was all shot to hell.

Has anyone else had any other embarrassing and/or annoying situations like this?

Cunobelin

Could have been worse!

This is my favourite:

This is why complete trust in a navigating system is not such a good idea. A woman from UK ended up into a river after trusting her atellite navigation system. The £96,000 Mercedes sports car was swept away in a swollen river and the motorist had to be rescued as it sank.

The driver was on her way to a christening party in Leicestershire when she was sent down a winding track usually used only by farmers in their 4x4s. Although the track is signposted as unsuitable for motor vehicles’, the driver carried on and found herself at a ford in the village of Sheepy Magna.

The Mercedes SL500 was swept 600 yards downstream, bouncing fromone bank of the River Sense to the other as the woman, in her late 20s and from London, frantically tried to escape. She was finally rescued by villager Alice Clark when the car ran aground.

The car remained stuck in the river for a week after the incident on March 3 until it was recovered by a tow-truck. It is believed to be a write-off.

Link

The though that the driver did not consider "Unsuitable for Motor Vehicles" applied to BMWs is one that amuses me!

nwallace

Almost every mapping agency that does cheap maps for GPS systems and have cheap enough API rights for websites to use don't plot UK roads correctly. This is because they take the OS map and assume every single thing with 2 lines is a road, including Whites. Anyone that can read an OS map knows that a "White" may be a road. It may not it may be a land rover track, it may not, in fact there are some that go right off the edges of cliffs because the OS haven't updated that part of the map since the survey for the Seventh Series 1 inch maps in 1948.

If it's Green, Red, Orange/Brown or Yellow then it is definitely a public road anything else and your going to have to judge it when you see it.


Now, I have some friends who didn't realise that the Hardknott was a road, and that Cattle Grid was a place. They think that an A road will always be quicker than a B road despite the fact the B road is 25 miles shorter.

My most embarrassing navigational mistake?
Me: "Take next side road right,"
Driver: "That one"
Me: Nah that looks like a farm entrance
Driver: "ok"
Me: "Wait it was, that's the end control down there"
2 mins later
Marshal: "Didn't I see you 2 minutes ago about to wrong slot?"

Since then I have realised that if it's on the ground then it's on the OS. With few exceptions.