Today's WSJ's A-Hed piece is about GPS systems sending traffic onto people's lawns due to bad mapping that has their greenswards down as thoroughfares.
Back in the day when there were only paper maps, I would occasionally read of the map companies, Rand-McNally, Hagstrom, et al that needed to change a tiny detail of their highly detailed maps when they somehow showed a short road that was really a person's driveway. The owner of the house with that driveway would occasionally get a vehicle, sometimes a tractor trailer, trying to use their driveway as a connecting road, only to find it brought then smack in front of a garage door, or another vehicle parked in the driveway. Backups were often difficult.
Well, the same thing is happening when digital GPS such as Google Maps, Mapquest, or Apple Maps clearly sends instructions to the user that your driveway or cul-de-sac is the back way to the Interstate. Houston, we have a problem.
The A-Hed piece reports on a flock of stories from across the nation of vehicles being sent down the wrong path and what the adjacent homeowners have taken to doing to correct the situation.
Notifying the creator of the application can result in corrections, sometimes taking a good while, sometime being quickly corrected, and sometimes not corrected at all.
When the situations goes uncorrected for a long time, homeowners have posted signs, such as the ones above, The homeowners have also parked large vehicles in an attempt to prevent through traffic. Sometimes this works; sometimes not. Mail boxes, front steps and lawns have been driven into and onto before the driver realizes they've made a boo-boo.
A few years I went rock shopping with my daughter and my son-in-law to a rock landscaping concern here on Long Island. I wanted to buy a medium-sized boulder for the backyard to act as a bit of a focal point. I love landscaping, and have learned of establishing focal points.
The stone yard had boulders of all sizes, shapes and colors. River stone, marble, and granite. Everything was priced at 50¢ a pound. The owner would take your chosen piece with a Bobcat forklift and weigh in on a truck scale, then deposit it on the roadbed of the pickup truck you hopefully came in.
Since my son-law works as a land surveyor and is in excellent standing with the owners, he can get access to the company's crew cab Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck. A Godsend for rock shopping.
I even commented on his access to such a vehicle at my daughter's wedding. I said my wife and I were surely not losing a daughter, but were instead gaining a son-in-law who comes with a truck.
The first of the two times we went rock shopping the workers at yard were loading an ENORMOUS boulder onto one of their flat bed tracks using a hoist. The boulder was so big the truck seemed to list with the weight. It looked precarious. We gave that truck a wide berth.
We asked who was buying such a large piece. The story went that a woman whose house was fairly close to a sharp curve was tired of having speeding vehicles take the turn too fast and veer off and come to a stop somewhat close to her house, tearing up the grass in the process.
Her plan was simple. Place the boulder on her property near the curve so that if a driver missed the curve they would whack into the boulder before running up on the grass toward the house. Possibly deadly for the driver, but hey, I guess she thought, you ran into the boulder. It wasn't moving. Hopefully, your airbag is working.
Cars missing the curve is not quite the same as a GPS sending you toward someone's driveway, but if you do come face-to-face with the Rock of Gibralter, you've probably done something wrong.
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