Where Are We? - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 150

unplowed logging roads that crisscross the national forests, where they got
stuck in deep snow. 4 Satellite navigation carried them beyond cell phone cov-
erage. They spent a harrowing night in the car, even making a farewell video. 5
Frantic relatives contacted two close friends, who found the stranded family
about twenty-four hours after they drove into the snow bank. The friends bor-
rowed a gps unit identical to Griffin's and duplicated the route he used. 6 Grif-
fin's family was one of three groups of travelers stranded that holiday weekend
after using gps to plot routes across remote, snow-clogged Oregon roads. They
drew the attention of the Associated Press and then cnn. 7 Soon their stories
went viral on the Internet. The Air Force felt compelled afterward to issue a
statement reminding the public that it operates the satellites that emit gps sig-
nals but neither creates nor updates the maps in devices, nor is it involved in
calculating routes between destinations. 8
Since gps navigation devices became mass consumer products many have
misused them, placed too much faith in them, or blamed them for unexpected
outcomes. Stories abound of people driving into swamps or onto railroad tracks
because, they say, the gps unit directed them to do so. One of the first televi-
sion commercials to tap this trend showed a driver crashing into a storefront
as the gps voice said, “Turn right [pause] in two hundred feet.” The popular
sitcom The Office had its main character robotically chant, “The machine
knows,” as he turned off a road—and into a lake. 9 Allstate Insurance commer-
cials featured the personified “Mayhem” posing as a gps unit giving incorrect
instructions because “you never update me, so now I just have to wing it.” By
2008 more than eight thousand visitors annually showed up in vehicles at the
front door to Ireland's famous Stone Age monument Newgrange after enter-
ing the landmark into gps units. 10 Ignoring the facility's published directions
in favor of self-guidance, all had to be sent south across the Boyne River to the
visitor's center, where official tours originate. British soldiers who repeatedly
steered army tanks and gun carriers down a narrow lane in Donnington, Eng-
land, some fifteen miles from their barracks blamed receiver error, and British
railroad officials blamed poor mapping software for tall trucks frequently strik-
ing low railroad bridges, causing millions in damages. 11 A Beaumont, Texas,
neighborhood near the Port of Orange reported a similar problem in 2009,
when big rigs began rolling down and having to back out of Childers Drive, a
narrow, tree-lined cul-de-sac. Drivers using gps units were trying to find
Childers Road, an industrial street several miles south lined with warehouses
and shipyards. 12 A contractor in Carrollton, Georgia, demolished the wrong