In Hawaii, GPS Keeps Sending Drivers Into the Ocean - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

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  It's not the "global positioning system" that's at fault here. It's the crappy routing and road info some jumped up advertising company has bolted together and barely tested.

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    That the car rental company was glad to get for free, because advertising, but they can charge customers more $/day for the convenience of directions into the sea.

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    Tools are only as useful as the user is smart enough to know when the tool is wrong.

    Or in simpler , there is no effective mitigation for a stupid user. They'll always find a way to abuse their tools and hurt themselves.

  • I would argue that blaming the navigation system is dumber than a human purposely driving into a body of water because the navigation system told them so.

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      I always used the "driving your car off a cliff" scenario as a bit of hyperbole, but it's good to know I was pretty much on the mark. Smartphones give you cranial muscle atrophy. Or at the very least, people with cranial muscle atrophy are attracted to them.

  • • Re: let's be clear here

      The article doesn't specify which GPS product is involved here.

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    That's surprising. I was expecting you to mention people being dumb enough to drive into the water. The first one did it during the day even.

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    No, it is people that should not be behind the wheel of a car. I know the spot discussed; no sane person would think that was a good idea.

• How can you protect stupid people from themselves? I don't think you can? All you can do is punish them when they do stupid stuff so that they don't injure other people due to their stupidity....
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  • • Re: Youth In Asia

      I first heard the word spoken when I was in middle school. A teacher used it as an example topic we could choose for an essay assignment. I remember wondering, what was the issues with Asian kids? I didnâ(TM)t find out what the actual word was for quite some time after. Now, 40 years later, I still laugh when I think about how uninformed I was.

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    But punishing them just makes it worse because stress and the perception of punitive actions upon them robs people of whatever intelligence they do have through emotional distortions , lending to more stupid mistake making.

• 1. Rent a car.
  2. Find the Maui Waui guy.
  3. Follow the talking car into the sea.

• "The computer said so!"
  "If the computer said so would you drive off a cliff?"
  "Well, yeah, if it said so..."

  At least this isn't something that happens all day every day. It sounds like some moron drives into the water every month or so which implies a whole bunch of other people didn't do it.

  I know that's a really low bar but some people still managed to fall under it.

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    Indeed. The computer wouldn't lie; lol.

    The really heartwarming thing here is they're refusing to add warning signs because such signs are obviously unnecessary. That's a very reasonable and level-headed response.

    Also amusing, when the human "goes on autopilot", then the navigation system that likely isn't rated or certified to any standard ends up driving the car.

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      Yeah I don't see how a sign would help. You're literally driving into the Pacific Ocean.

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      Perhaps. I think it's a better moment to point out that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

• People are always driving and looking for secluded and less traveled areas (hidden gems, green sandy beaches, etc.). Itâ(TM)s not uncommon to drive out of a cell zone or lose GPS due to freak weather changes. That happens a lot and your occasional âoetest drillâ inbound ICBM missile.
• When Apple Maps first came out, it would direct people down the runway at the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. People would drive past the guard at the gate and onto the runway. I don't know if these people had just never been to a airport, but a runway is marked significantly different than a road. Should have been obvious that it was the wrong way.

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    I actually almost drove onto a taxiway at a small airstrip recently because it looked like the logical way to go-- no signage due to...airplanes. Were the Fairbanks incursions on the University Ave side? I can see how some of the areas there are a little tricky (There is/was a lot of points of entry via the GA ramps, but it is poor directions for sure.

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    Thank you for pointing this out; it made me chuckle. Life is strange.

    Just imagine one of the people in this story driving into the ocean. Subsequently, a police officer pulls up to help them out of the situation, and the driver starts arguing about the linguistic construction of the word interstate.

• I encountered a place where there is a car park, then a hundred meter road where you can drive on a ferry. If you try to drive on the ferry when there is no ferry there, you'll end up in a lake.
  
  I drove about 2/3rds of the way getting more and more suspicious and slowing down, then turned around. In a dark night it would have been entirely possible to drive into that lake.

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    The ferry dock doesn't have a barrier with reflectors and perhaps flashing lights on it?

    For a boat ramp, I'd expect a similar barrier. Put there to collect some exorbitant launch fee before raising the gate.

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      I have seen plenty of government and private boat ramps (I live in Ontario, Canada where you can't throw a stone outside a city without hitting a lake of some kind), and not once have I seen any kind of indicator or barrier on them except a sign warning you about the angle.

      Ferry docks, on the other hand, usually have a substantial gate.

• Tourists started driving the wrong way on one way streets in San Francisco when GPS started becoming popular in rental cars. And let's pretend human beings can learn to take faulty map and GPS data and drive without crashing into something. The next question is can a self-driving car do the same thing? (spoiler: no, no it cannot)

• The GPS just gives the position. The problem is map material made by somebody else.

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    While you are certainly technically correct, linguistic usage has shifted such that people sometimes use the term "GPS" to refer to the navigation system in their smartphone or car that gives them driving directions.

• I've had several experiences with GPS errors. It's always something where the GPS cannot figure out the name of the street I gave it, so it takes me to the center of the city. Or if the street does not have a address of 5536 my street, it will take me to the center of that street. Sometimes, it's not a bug deal, one time i was driving in a snowstorm and it took me way far away. The problem is that the GPS is trying to be helpful, but failing miserably. What the GPS needs to do instead is tell me that it doesn't recognize the address and then i can double check it and fix it. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's infuriating. It's just like chatGPT - it tries to be helpful and will tell you that it knows the truth and it is absolutely sure of it, but actually, it has no clue - but, GPS got there first - it says "oh yeah, i can find that for you", tries its best, but sometimes fails astoundingly. What both of them need to do is tell the user that they are unsure and not pretend to be the all knowing oracle that they are not.

• ...just remove all the warning signs. (Not my idea, but I agree with it.)

  If you're that stupid, humanity is better off without you. There are nearly 8 billion of us...we can start culling a little, and this is an easy way.

• I would expect this of a self-driving car, but how can people be so stupid? This is hardly an isolated situation either. The simple fact is that outside of major metropolitan areas the maps that most programs use are apparently simply copied off of satellite photos. No one checks if the roads are passible or open to the public or safe. When driving keep your eyes and brain engaged.

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    They are Tourists they were probably "Rubber necking" (looking everywhere but at the road ) this is a problem older than GPS but made much worse by it. Live in a area that has a large tourist draw for a year or two you see this sort of thing constantly.
• Not sure how you can do this during the day but at night with no street lighting it can happen. In the days before GPS my dad drove off a wharf one night when he turn one road early, before the intended road that had a small flat bridge between two wharfs. Apparently he was not the only person to do that before they put up warning signage.