Doing it old school without GPS.

Coming up from Miami, Fl. back to Cocoa Beach, the GPS routed us up Hwy. 1 instead of up I-95, clearly 95 being the better route. Was the GPS programmed by the people who wanted you to go up Hwy.1 to frequent the businesses along the way?

 

GPS will route you on the shortest route if it will save you a mile. Doesn't care if you are running interstate or local. It's up to the driver to use the BPS (Brain Positioning System) to run the most efficient route.

 

[QUOTE="semi" retired;3994552]Coming up from Miami, Fl. back to Cocoa Beach, the GPS routed us up Hwy. 1 instead of up I-95, clearly 95 being the better route. Was the GPS programmed by the people who wanted you to go up Hwy.1 to frequent the businesses along the way?[/QUOTE]

The routing algorithms are rather primitive... "fastest time" or "shortest distance." Fastest time usually puts you on the big road, but shortest distance has you timberbashin' all over the place.

OTOH, shortest distance did get me around the traffic mess on I80 yesterday afternoon near Joliet IL. Wasn't anyone on the two-lanes!

 

<sigh> Where did I say I followed the directions?I just gave two examples of poor directions given and how I superceded them.

 

Actually, as much as I complain about technology, that traffic dealy bob is pretty cool. On a trip to L.A., my daughter has that on her phone, and with traffic being what it is there, when we had to be somewhere(like everybody else out there) she pushed a button, and said, "Rats, the 101 is stopped", and we took surface streets, and rolled right along(except for the 40 stop lights, of course)

 

GPS can cause you to get pulled on a short cut on a mountain pass that is restricted for trucks-trailers. where I live, most trucks from cr england/central and others that have gps trucks get pulled.

 

That's why ya got an atlas... ya got to be a real moron just to completely trust the little box. Garbage programming in, botched directions out...

 

guess i'm a moron.

never gotten into trouble cept when i make my own decisions. never use the atlas cept for state dot numbers.

my parameters are set accordingly. gps knows the streets better then i do. so i don't even argue with it anymore.

i'm a moron with my gps.

 

GPSs don't get a driver pulled over, the driver gets himself pulled over.

 

It's funny how GPSs are causing all these drivers to get lost and hit low bridges whereas none of that ever seem to have happened back in the paper atlas days. No one ever got lost, ended down the wrong road, or even hit a clearly marked bridge and atlases never had wrong information, it seems.

You'd figure there'd be Congressional hearings about the havoc and terror these new fangled GPSs are causing on America's roadways.

I blame the mega carriers cuz there were none around back in them days.

The above was sarcastic, of course.