App fixed it after it left drivers stranded

Another good reason not to soley rely on tech for navigation.

CNN) — Gone are the days of printing out directions or following physical maps. If you’re trying to go somewhere and need directions, there are plenty of apps to update you while you travel in real-time.

But nothing is foolproof and that’s what drivers using the Google-owned, navigation app Waze are finding out after they were sent many miles away from the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, New Jersey, according to Jackson Police Department’s public information officer Lt. Christopher Parise.

Drivers attempting to get to the Borgata Hotel using Waze directions have had their cars stuck in the sand at Colliers Mills Wildlife Management Area, near Lake Success instead, almost 45 miles away from the casino.

https://q13fox.com/2020/01/22/waze-fixes...om-destination/

Should not one get a trifle suspicious when, driving to a major destination in a well developed urban area, you are directed onto an unpaved secondary road? Far less likely to happen with the old fashioned paper maps.

There is VERY spotty 3G/4G data service where I live now so I don't use a smartphone for navigation (pre-saving maps is a pain). Even when I lived in the Chicago suburbs I didn't want to use my phone's data allocation for navigation. So, I've always been a Garmin Nuvi user.

Once, while driving around a large state park in southern Illinois the Garmin tried to send us down a dirt road, and across a field. We didn't follow its recommendations. I do wish it had an option to mark a travel barrier ahead, and then reroute.

A similar but larger scale reroute happened to me in Germany, where an entire major highway was closed. I ended up setting the Garmin map (I purchased the German road maps micro SD card) to north up, and just kept taking north and east turns (the general direction we needed to go). We eventually got to our destination. There my smartphone simply couldn't get data (I was unwilling to pay the cost).

My basic rule is that if I wasn’t planning on driving dirt roads, a turn onto a dirt road is immediately followed by going back to the pavement. Planning is a key word — there are plenty of great places to get to on dirt roads but at the very least I have reviewed paper maps and brought them with me. More commonly I preload maps onto a device for ease of use and for reducing ambiguity with GPS.

Humm
Paper, Rock, electronic devises, choose carefully