Your GPS took you where??

Beyatchin Betty would get me lost turning around in my driveway....

 

Think I've been there. Somewhere on SR22 near Oconto Falls Garmin tries to put me on a snowmobile trail.

 

Unless you want to spend a long not-so-fun-filled day with some of our boys in uniform at Fort Myer military base, located within spitting distance of the Pentagon.....

NEVER trust ANY GPS system around Washington DC.

And since I already know someone is bound to ask....

Yes....I speak from experience and am hoping it didn't earn me a black mark in an FBI file somewhere.

RT

 

Even google and mapquest can put you on the wrong road, or give wrong directions, so why would it be any different than a gps? When i didnt feel i had the best directions i called the shipper or consignee or i called someone i worked with that had been there before and always had pretty decent luck, even dipatchers can get you lost and on the wrong road, imagine that.. lol

 

Remember how for a while swift's automatic routing was putting trucks on the tail of the dragon...? hah.

I was in tunkhannock PA, and for those of you who dont know, I-81 runs really close to it, but if youre coming from the "other way" (southwest i believe), you have to take about a hundred miles of two lane roads wayyy out in the boonies to get there. Well, first of all i got a little ####y and had already been to exactly where i was going, and GPS told me to turn right, and i thought i remembered turning right (this is on a US highway, so not such a big deal..if it wasnt a us highway i wouldve been more careful LOL), well, wrong way and nowhere to turn around for FIFTEEN MILES....OUCH.

But after i got out of there, i was trying to follow exactly the way werner's directions were telling me to get out of there (which is what i usually do, using the GPS as a TOOL to make it easier/less complicated and tell me where surface streets are when i have to turn on them, especially when i end up in places where the signs have been STOLEN..LOL). Anyway, i dont remember the exact roads but i ended up on this very steep pretty curvy PA route, and the GPS was of course telling me to go a different way, and i ignored it assuming werner's way was better. (i was going the way the qualcom told me to here!)....well, it told me to make a left on a dirtbike trail. I thought maybe that wasnt it and maybe the distances were off, and finally i got to where the road ended at a T intersection, where my GPS was telling me to go....and that intersection was US-220, which let me pick back up on my qualcomm route. All the roads traveled were truck routes, but i just dont see why they give us such crazy routes on the qualcomm sometimes!


when i worked for crst they had lots of pictures of accidents with explanations from the driver on them on the walls. One showed a truck that got its landing gear hung up on what appears to me to be a dirtbike jump in the middle of a desert in arizona, with no road in site. The explanation was that this guy was following GPS directions and made a wrong turn. The road just kept getting worse and worse, but he just kept going, until he got his landing gear hung up on what looks to me to be a DIRTBIKE JUMP. Also, it says that the tow truck almost got stuck trying to get to him, and that the tow truck driver said that the "road" was way worse than it looked in the pics. It was so stupid that i could compare it to if you just turned into a cornfield and ran into a combine.

 

Mines has done the same thing. In new york city mines had me going to a cematery, its sent me to a military base dead end steets also told me to drive through a couple of forests. I just my map and a phone to ask people where i should go and my gps as a reference.

 

a few days ago i turned the wrong way after i got off the highway (very confusing signs due to road construction in indianapolis off east side 465, plus it wasnt the route my gps told me, plus the way the qualcom told me didnt account for road construction). I kept going and eventually my gps told me to turn onto a road that was actually a truck route. It told me to turn onto another truck route about a block down, which intersected with the highway, but hey, right after that, it intersects with the road im going to!

it turned out that the road i was turning onto deadends into a parking lot at another warehouse. I couldve turned there and cut through their lot, but i didnt know it was on the other side, i thought the gps was just wrong. kept going and hey theres a low bridge.....i got out of it safely but it took me an excessive amount of time to turn around because of icy parking lots!


Anyway i only use GPS as a reference tool. I dont follow it unless i verify its route with the routing that i was told on the qualcom and what a phone call or two reveals. I also have a 2008 spiral bound motor carriers atlas (missed the 09s going on clearance cause i was off the road). Mine also has lifetime traffic updates which is cool, tells you when where and how bad traffic is backed up, sometimes its just plain wrong but thats usually because it always assumes traffic is backed up in road construction. It also gives ads but you can push a button and get useful coupons off it for things like hotels. ads are non intrusive and come through the traffic updates FM signal.

Tonight it helped me find a hotel that was not very far off the highway, but has a couple of weird turns that without it, i probably wouldve gotten lost if i trusted directions from the hotel clerk...

 

LMAO! This is exactly what my co-driver calls our GPS!

Today our GPS tried to get us to turn right off of a bridge. We are starting to think ours is homicidal.

 

I'm pretty certain mine has developed a sense of humor and is trying to get me arrested.

 

lmao, i hear ya!