There is no street here!

[Mental_Mouse]

I don't drive myself, but I've seen some doozies from the passenger seat. (Fortunately, the folks who drive me are usually sensible enough to override when necessary.) When I originally moved down to my current town, my Mom drove me around for house-hunting; at one point, the GPS tried to route us through a house (admittedly, that was dividing two segments of what clearly had once been a through street).

But what really takes the cake is the iPhone's walking directions. The few times I tried it, the Fruitcake consistently routed me halfway around town. I gave up for good after trying to follow its directions from my house to downtown (maybe a 30-45 minute walk if I follow the bus route). It started by sending me down a highway with no sidewalks, but that looked like it could get me there eventually (and I'm a determined walker), so I walked the shoulder. But then, at about 2/3s the distance, it told me to leave the highway and turn right to another street.. Looking to my right, I saw (IIRC in this order):
1) A couple of strands of old barbed wire
2) A 15-20' gully
3) a chain-link fence (~10' high)
4) 100 feet or so of "forest"
5) Behind which was the parking lots of a small shopping mall.

Getting back to genuinely walkable territory was an adventure in itself....

[Ben_Who]

When my roommate discovered that it cost $80 per year to update his GPS, he let it go for a little while; "a little while" being about ten years. It reached the point where it was an actual hazard, insisting that I was driving through a field or begging me to make a U-turn into a river. I stopped using it after a disastrous trip to Boston.

The city's streets are already a mess, but downtown is a natural for GPS, since the streets haven't changed in centuries. Roommate's antique GPS kept trying to send me along pedestrian paths on the Common or the wrong way down one-way streets.

I bought my own. Sometimes we'll turn them both on and make them compete. It can be fun listening to them bicker. (Roommate did eventually pay for an update, and his GPS is much more accurate now.)

I've also windshield-mounted a smart phone, but it's a data pig, so I only used it for a few minutes at a time.

[Kogarashi]

it has sent me up and down some side streets, making three lefts, two rights, and a U-turn, rather than just get me to the right place and have me turn in.

It was either last year on a family vacation in SoCal, or this year when Hubby and I were house-hunting. Hubby and I don't have GPS apps or devices (no standalone devices, no data plan for our phones), but whoever we were riding with (in-laws or realtor) did. At one point the GPS told us to turn left out of a side street, travel a bit, do a U-turn, and then continue back past the side street we'd been on to get where we wanted to go.

Only thing: there was absolutely nothing preventing a right turn out of the side street in the first place, saving us an unnecessary left turn and U-turn. None of us had any clue why the GPS had us do that, but it wasn't the only time some weird navigation stunt like that occurred on the trip.

[protege]

Mr. Nutrax & I attended a family reunion in San Francisco. We stayed at the same hotel as his sister & her husband. They had a GPS, we had a paper map. (You can predict the results.) They left the hotel 15 minutes ahead of us and arrived 10 minutes after we did. We took a surface street; they took the freeway that the GPS wanted. During rush hour.

Some of my coworkers--who are not from Pittsburgh--insist on using their GPS to get to the airport. How hard is it to get onto the parkway, head west, and follow the big "Airport" signs everywhere? Naturally, if I'm tailing them, I usually roar past, and get there several minutes early. Of course, it helps that after living in the city for nearly 40 years...you know where the cops sit, what's currently under construction...and can usually get around it

[wolfie]

The most important part of learning how to use a GPS is learning when to ignore it. Ever drive the NJTP? Near the north end, where they have "cars only" and "all traffic" lanes, the same exit will be from one side of the road in the "cars only" lanes and the other side of the road in the "all traffic" lanes. Also, GPS maps can be out of date, and recent construction can put the exit you want to take on the other side of the road from where it was when the map was made.

[Jay 2K Winger]

My GPS app can be annoying at times. I call the voice "Navi" for that very reason.

I'm not sure how you'd go about silencing your GPS app, though.

A hammer will shut Navi up pretty good.

Mind you, it will shut up everything on your phone. Usually in a warranty-voiding way.

[nutraxfornerves]

A number of US National Parks have explicit warnings that "your cell phone and/or GPS aren't always going to work here!!!" And people still prefer to believe their gadget instead of a map or verbal directions.

"It's what I'm beginning to call death by GPS," said Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan "People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere." [He was talking to a reporter about a recent death of a child, where the parent relied on GPS and got stuck in sand on a dead end road.]...

"People are so reliant on their GPS that they fail to look out the windshield and make wise decisions based on what they're seeing," said [a search & rescue coordinator].

Mr. Nutrax & I attended a family reunion in San Francisco. We stayed at the same hotel as his sister & her husband. They had a GPS, we had a paper map. (You can predict the results.) They left the hotel 15 minutes ahead of us and arrived 10 minutes after we did. We took a surface street; they took the freeway that the GPS wanted. During rush hour.

[LoTech]

My girlfriend thinks I should use my phone's GPS, which to be fair, is usually more accurate, though not always. The advantage to my Tom Tom is that I can mount it on the windshield so I can just glance at it, and I can silence it, so I can continue to listen to the radio and not "in 400 feet, stay right" every 2 minutes for 20 miles when the road is not changing. (Though my phone's vocal instructions aren't as annoyingly repetitive as the Tom Tom's.)

I bought a suction-cup smartphone holder for just a few dollars, so you ought to be able to windshield-mount your phone, if you like. I'm not sure how you'd go about silencing your GPS app, though.

[Jester]

Oh, where to even begin?

On multiple occasions when tourists have asked me for directions, I had to tell them to put away their phone, as they wouldn't need it. I sometimes had to repeat that to some stubborn tech addicts. Not that I'm trying to confuse them. But what they were looking for was either right down the street or involved one damn turn, instructions so easy Ray Charles could find his way with them.

As for GPS, my Tom Tom is often wrong wrong. One of my favorite bars in Orlando, for example, seems invisible to it. If I try to enter the bar's name, it can't find it. If I enter the bar's address, it sends me to a different section of that road a mile or two away. I have no idea why.

On multiple occasions in Miami, it has sent me up and down some side streets, making three lefts, two rights, and a U-turn, rather than just get me to the right place and have me turn in. Again, no idea why.

It has also tried to put me on a toll road when I specified no toll roads (I was in a rental car and did not want to spring for the ridiculous extra fee they charge for the Sun Pass), and has tried to make me make a maneuver that was explicitly prohibited by a sign at that point in the road.

My girlfriend thinks I should use my phone's GPS, which to be fair, is usually more accurate, though not always. The advantage to my Tom Tom is that I can mount it on the windshield so I can just glance at it, and I can silence it, so I can continue to listen to the radio and not "in 400 feet, stay right" every 2 minutes for 20 miles when the road is not changing. (Though my phone's vocal instructions aren't as annoyingly repetitive as the Tom Tom's.)

[Deserted]

The employee:

1. Believes that "even when the boss is wrong, the boss is right".
2. Is gullible enough to believe the boss, even when the boss is clearly wrong.

It's like a real-life Dilbert strip!

Even better, the guy said he was late for his first day with this boss... when we got there, my passenger was the first person there, aside from the boss.

I bought a standalone GPS specifically to avoid all the issues I keep hearing people having with smartphone based GPS apps. And my "G-man" does pretty good, aside from the occasional bit of out-of-date map where an intersection has been redone to make the north/south street go straight through instead of the East/West street. It also seemed to help a bit when I upgraded to a four-digit model from my not very old two-digit model after I broke the power jack by trying to put it away without unplugging the cable. Ooops.

That's exactly what I have, a "G-man". I choose to stick with the out-of-date maps, even though I have lifetime free updates, because the updates tend to seriously mess things up.

[protege]

Last summer my GPS routed me through Philadelphia coming home from Greenville NC ... the damned thing put me into a dead end by the old Phily Navy Yard, and getting back to the NJ Turnpike effectively routed me through the rather battle scarred parts of Trenton, and of course my damned car needed fuel at 2 am...

Sounds like you ended up in Camden rather than Trenton But seriously, that's an area that nobody wants to end up in at night. Trust me. For years, when we'd go on vacation, we'd stop at my aunt's house in Moorestown, NJ. Pain in the ass to get there, mostly because it was tricky. If you missed the turn...you'd end up in Camden, complete with burnt-out cars, drug dealers, and other nasty stuff. Even though they'd lived there for years, if you weren't paying attention (or if my dad was driving), we'd get lost.

[Ghel]

A few years ago, I had my Fruitfone GPS tell me to drive through a lake! (well, a pond really) Granted, the highway had just been redone and that part of the map hadn't been updated yet, but we were already off the highway and on previously existing roads.

[LoTech]

I bought a standalone GPS specifically to avoid all the issues I keep hearing people having with smartphone based GPS apps. And my "G-man" does pretty good, aside from the occasional bit of out-of-date map where an intersection has been redone to make the north/south street go straight through instead of the East/West street. It also seemed to help a bit when I upgraded to a four-digit model from my not very old two-digit model after I broke the power jack by trying to put it away without unplugging the cable. Ooops.

[RootedPhoenix]

And I thought Google Maps messing up Salt Lake City's grid system was bad! (It's bad enough....)

[wolfie]

If you are going to include an option for "bicycle" in the route selection, then you should damn well pay attention to both the places bikes *aren't* allowed, but also to the places bikes *are* allowed, but cars aren't.

And if your GPS software has "Truck" in the name, if somebody checks the "53 foot trailer" box it should NOT route them along a road which has signs "Trailers over 28 1/2 feet prohibited". Happened to me some time ago - fortunately the first such sign was immediately after leaving the interstate, and I was able to get back on and take a longer (but legal) route.