Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
"Karen" is lying to you.
Perhaps lying is too strong a word; Karen just isn't taking the direct approach. Follow her advice, and where does it get you? Stuck on a dirt road in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio.
Karen isn't real, of course; she's just a prerecorded voice on a Global Positioning System unit. But a surprising number of folks check their common sense at the car door when they turn on their units and drive away.
"People have become overreliant on the units and in some cases, misunderstand the rules of use," said psychologist Colin Ellard, author of the book, "YOU ARE HERE: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall."
Almost anyone who has used a GPS unit - be it Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, portable or built into a car's dash - has an "oops" story to tell. GPS can be a godsend on the family trip to Tampa, Fla., but from time to time also can provide inexplicably awful directions.
How else to explain a Toyota navigation system's recent insistence that the best way from Dormont to the North Side was via Pittsburgh International Airport?
"I don't think there is a big learning curve. It's more often a matter of people putting blind faith into a device without doing some very, very basic double-checking," said Tim Flight, founder of the GPSReview.net Web site, which rates units and provides consumer forums and trend news.
"Even today when I put an address into a GPS and hit 'OK,' I still check the review function to say 'Yeah, this looks reasonable.' "
PG mapMr. Flight, who sold the site less than two years ago but is still its editor, operates out of Carrabassett Valley, Maine.
"It's near nothing," said the man who appreciates accurate directions while driving a snowy, mountainous landscape.
Events over the holidays would support his concern. In Oregon, there were at least three incidents of motorists stranded in the drifts, most notably that of Jeramie Griffin, his companion, Megan Garrison, and their toddler. The family, using a portable GPS Mr. Griffin received as a Christmas present, tried a "shortcut" across the Cascade Range and got stuck on a snowy local road for 24 hours before being rescued.
They carried no paper maps in the car, and their cell phones were out of signal range.
GPS is a high-tech wonder, say experts, but the importance of backup directions is neck and neck with exercising common sense.
"There is still a lot of misconception out there as to how GPS works and what it does do," Mr. Flight said. "A lot of people believe all of the data and maps and pictures are downloaded in real time, and as soon as a new road is created, it's automatically beamed down to their devices."
GPS was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. About 30 satellites - solar-powered, with backup batteries - were launched into orbit between 1978 and 1994. Not all operate at the same time, and the satellites must be replaced as they wear out.
Using latitude, longitude and altitude as markers, signals are beamed to receiving stations on earth. Although consumer-grade GPS signals were available under the original design, they were scrambled and therefore only accurate to within 100 meters.
"It got you in the ballpark, but not where you needed to be," said Mr. Flight, adding that today's consumer-grade signals are no longer scrambled and are "95 percent" accurate.
But GPS is only as strong as the most reliable maps, and manufacturers say consumers should download the most recent versions at least every other year. Depending on the unit and the manufacturer's agreement, this can run anywhere from $50 for a low-end Garmin Nuvi to $199 for the DVD upgrade on Toyota's in-car navigation systems.
Even with the latest maps, GPS units can't fathom the weather or the crazy-quilt nature of Pittsburgh's street system. Programming a simple point-to-point destination on six different devices might get you many different sets of directions. (See related story.)
Sometimes, when good GPS units give bad directions, people just don't want to believe that "Karen" - or whatever name they've bestowed on their talking navigation systems - is leading them astray.
Ann Wright Rose, of Bethel Park, is a manager for a large company and travels frequently. On a trip to Kansas City, her trusted Garmin - "Ginnie" - failed to recognize a newly constructed ramp.
She circled the city three times before pulling off, finding a parking lot and typing in a specific street intersection near her intended destination. "Ginnie" recalculated the route and they arrived without further incident.
"I remember how the TV show 'Dallas' opened with the long shot of the city and that's what it felt like; I could almost hear the music in my head," Ms. Wright Rose said, laughing.
A national accounts manager in a division of Sherwin-Williams, she travels the country with "Ginnie" in her carry-on bag. She always checks a paper map before getting into the rental car, however, and admits that her reliance on GPS has probably degraded her ability to analyze the former.
Wasting time while lost is one thing, being led into danger quite another. In West Yorkshire, Great Britain, Robert Jones refused to change course after his GPS instructed him to drive up a cliff-side path last year. Running into a fence stopped him from plunging 100 feet down the side, but he was convicted of "driving without due care and attention" and fined almost $3,200.
Part of that went toward paying for the nine-hour operation to get his car removed from the cliff.
"The path was not designated for motor vehicles, yet Mr. Jones slavishly continued to follow the [GPS] system to the point where his eyes and his brain must have been telling him otherwise, to such a degree he was not exercising proper control of the vehicle," prosecutor Waseem Raja noted in court.
Mr. Jones, in his defense, said, "I might have been an idiot for taking the wrong road or carrying on, but I have not driven without due care or attention."
Indeed, many people would argue that following GPS directions IS a common-sense solution on strange roads. They assume the little device must know something they don't.
"Part of it is because of that underlying weakness many of us have, where we are all too willing to surrender to this wonderful machine," said Dr. Ellard, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada (www.colinellard.com).
"People who have anxiety about way finding - and lots of people do - are all too willing to shut down."
He noted that it's fine to use GPS - backed by other sources of information - but it's also important to practice "being in the here and now." One of the concepts addressed in his book involves humans' loss of way-finding skills as they moved into cities.
"Urban settings provide all sorts of distractions, and that produces mind wandering, which is at the core of getting lost," Dr. Ellard said.
But even he has known the sting of GPS betrayal. Driving back to Ontario after visiting his brother in central Ohio, he and the family decided it might be fun to follow the programmed directions.
It wasn't until some time later they realized it had been set to avoid toll roads, he said.
"The only way to get to Canada doing that is to drive about an extra 400 miles. We realized we were being led to northern Michigan."
Still, it could be worse. He cited the case of a Swedish couple who hoped to visit the Isle of Capri in Italy last summer.
But they typed in "Carpi," which is a small town 400 miles away.
"In this case, there was nothing wrong with the unit, just staggering human failure," Dr. Ellard said.
An official at the tourism bureau in Capri wondered why the Swedes didn't realize something was amiss: "Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn't cross any bridges or take any boat?"
Last summer, David Lewis, of Cambridge, Ohio, headed toward Confluence, Somerset County, with a 16-foot kayak strapped to the roof of his all-wheel-drive Subaru. He missed a turn suggested by his GPS and was redirected down a small dirt lane littered with rocks the size of a baby's head "in the middle of a big downhill."
Hitting a virtual dead end, "I gave up on the GPS [and my ego] and decided to retreat."
Mr. Flight said he and his girlfriend have a joke: "She'll ask me 'Do you know where you're going?'
"And I say 'Of course I know where I'm going. It's how to get there that's the problem.' "
Washington correspondent Daniel Malloy writes the "Pittsburgh On The Potomac" blog exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
