*Got this and decide to share it.* I should be more grateful. As comedian Louis CKsays, everything is amazing.
But three weeks ago, when Google Maps directed me to drive my carup some stairs in Rijeka, Croatia, it was awfully hard to appreciate the miracle of modern technology.
I'm a cartography lover, so no Google project has directly appealed to me more than Google Maps. I eagerly embraced every new ability: plotting routes, finding businesses, scoping out neighborhoods, booking hotel rooms, exploring destinations, figuring out my location during a hike -- and using the Androidapp to give me turn-by-turn driving directions.
As Google Maps' driving directions improved in the four years I've been using them, I grew to rely on the app more and more for navigation. It made mistakes every now and again, but gone were the days when I'd pay a rental car company a big premium for a beat-up sat-nav device.
Alas, my love affair ended during my August vacation in Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy. My Nexus 5phone and I were lead navigators for a two-car family trip, and I was led astray so often that it became a running joke.
I'm willing to cut the app some slack. GPS satellite radio signals can be blocked by buildings and trees. The network was occasionally spotty. Given those tight switchbacks in the Dolomites of Italy, I can forgive a phone that thought I pulled a U-turn when in reality I drove through a tight 180-degree hairpin turn.
But this was worse. Here are some of the problems I experienced:
Orientation problems meant that the app, instead of representing our car as a blue arrow pointing forward on a road that extended up the screen, would rotate the view about 60 degrees. It's not a critical problem, but it means a driver has to perform one more transformation before understanding the image. On other occasions the arrow was oriented sideways to the road. Once it was so bad it showed our arrow pointing backward while the road extended forward. Though most of these problems were blips, the last one took an app restart to fix.
Several times, the app showed our car driving way off the road. I've had this problem before and attributed it to GPS issues, but it was distressingly frequent on our trip, and many times I couldn't even see our "you are here" blue arrow on the screen.
When we were trying to drive northwest to Vicenza, the app routed us southeast to Padua on the autostrada. We drove about 20 kilometers the wrong way before figuring it out. This angered me so much that I fired my Nexus 5 and tried my wife's iPhone 5S running Google Maps. It seemed less bamboozled and it tracked orientation better, but later in the trip it also gave bad advice.
And in Rijeka, Croatia, the app routed us up a very steep and narrow street. I was skeptical but followed the advice. At the top, where the street was blocked by bollards and turned into a path in a park, the app advised us to take the stairs. (No, I hadn't changed it to pedestrian mode.) It took about 10 minutes to turn around our miniconvoy and extricate ourselves.
Google wants Google Maps to be the all-knowing geographic assistant that gets me where I need to go. But now I have trust issues.
Source: http://onthirdplanet.com/how-google-map-led-me-astray.html#

Lol.