There is no street here!

[otter]

On a road trip to Pensacola recently, my GPS kept getting me off the highway and running me through downtown of *insert random major city*, and then get right back on the highway. Including a detour through Atlanta's seediest looking districts, at 2am, twisting and turning on 25 mph streets and ignoring exits onto the highway in favor of one ten miles away.

Being a lone white female stuck on a dark street at a red light staring down some guys on the corner with crowbars... Super fun.

Aso, is it just me or do GPSes start out with one time and then it inexplicitly gets longer and longer....?

[Cia]

Google Maps has the back parking lot of the strip mall on the north side of the building where I work marked as the road that is actually on the south side of the building. I don't know what the Google van was thinking when they came up with this one.

[AccountingDrone]

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... I can tell you that I was glad my concealed carry permit for NJ was still valid as I was wearing my sidearm and it was readily available. The clerk for the place was inside a kiosk with inch thick bullet proof glass ... and I did not get warm fuzzy feelings about being standing out alone in a slum.

I have also gotten rid of the damned thing, and carry both printed out directions with maps, a AAA travel triptic and an actual road atlas now. Screw electronics.

[Lovecats]

I've had a GPS try to route me up a cliff...

When GPS's go bad .

[Terza]

When DH and I drove to Chesterfield once for a weekend away, we borrowed FIL's satnav for the journey.
Luckily, we also took printed directions, because we got to within 5 miles of Chesterfield and the satnav started telling us we were going the wrong way and to do a u-turn! Since we could see road signs and they matched the printed directions, the satnav landed in the back seat and stayed there until we gave it back to FIL!

[mjr]

him: My boss says we turn down this street.
me: There's no street here.
him: The map he sent says it's down this street.
me: The map is wrong. That street doesn't exist.
him: It says we turn here and follow the road around.
me: That's an apartment complex. It doesn't go through. Look up from your phone man, there is no street here!

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!

[Valentinian]

When GPS's go bad .

at least it was up and not down. (It did try to send us down the cliff on the way back home, but we were ready for its shenanigans!)

[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.

[RootedPhoenix]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.