Navigation App’s Insistence on ‘Keep Straight’ Tested by Quai’s End
PARIS — The Seine, which has existed at its current location for several geological epochs and whose width and depth are both sufficient to prevent vehicle passage, has received in its proximity three incidents this year of drivers whose GPS instructions included “keep straight” at a point where the quai ends and the river begins. In two of the three cases, the driver stopped. In the third case, the driver proceeded twenty meters past the barrier before the river’s presence was processed as information that overrode the navigation instruction.
“The app said keep straight,” the driver later explained. “The quai said keep straight. The barrier was not in the app.” The barrier is a standard concrete barrier installed when the quai ends. The barrier is in the satellite imagery from which map data is derived. The barrier’s data was not incorporated into the navigation layer. The navigation layer was confident. The barrier remained.
The GPS Confidence Problem
GPS navigation systems have achieved a cultural authority that has partially replaced drivers’ direct environmental assessment, producing occasional incidents where the instruction and the road differ and the instruction is followed beyond the point where the road would have intervened. The river is more persuasive than the GPS in all three documented cases. Two drivers were persuaded before contact. One was persuaded at twenty meters. The app recalculated in all three cases.
According to France’s road safety authority, GPS overreliance contributes to approximately 3% of road incidents annually. The Seine contributes to a smaller percentage. The recalculation in all three cases produced a route that avoided the river by routing to the bridge, which was always available and which the drivers would have found by looking up from the screen.
Grounded in reality at Virtuosal.com.
