GPS and Human Error Can Lead Drivers Astray - Digital Domain

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012

GPS and Human Error Can Lead Drivers Astray - Digital Domain

By RANDALL STROSS

The turn-by-turn instructions of GPS-based navigation systems, ingeniously designed though they may be, can’t always save us from ourselves.

Consider the experience of a man from San Diego who flew to the East Coast and picked up a GPS-equipped rental car at the airport. After 20 minutes, he sensed he was headed in the wrong direction. Then he realized that he had unthinkingly entered his California address as his destination.

“The navigation system had dutifully set a route back to his home in San Diego, 3,000 miles away,” said Barry Brown, co-director of the Mobile Life Center, based in Stockholm, which does research on mobile communication. The incident happened to a friend of his.

Mr. Brown is co-author of a recent paper titled “The Normal Natural Troubles of Driving With GPS.” The paper illuminates a drawback of GPS technology: that it is designed for docile drivers whose navigational skills have atrophied.

The field work for the study was done last year. Dr. Brown, who was then teaching at the University of California, San Diego, and a student assistant, Allison Primack, installed two video cameras in cars to record students and their parents as they drove with personal navigation systems of various kinds. The videotapes captured the turn-by-turn instructions, the drivers’ responses, and, when things went badly and passengers were present, the in-car conversations about what to do — expletives included.

After analyzing the videotapes of their subjects’ trips, the researchers constructed a typology of navigation “troubles,” including destination, route, sensing of the car’s location and timing of a given turn instruction.

Human error, as it turns out, was responsible for many of the problems that occurred.

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