Satellite Navigation a Real Crackpot! 230
debest writes "What happens when your satellite navigation system in your car gives you bad advice on which road you should take? In Britain, these systems have been directing drivers down a road near the (aptly named) town of Crackpot that is strewn with boulders and has an unprotected 100ft dropoff on one side! The locals are worried someone's going to go off the edge."
Re:They really have 2 options: (Score:5, Informative)
2) Stabilize the slope above and install a guard rail.
1) good idea - but they're going to also need to provide directions for an alternate route
2) This sounds like a rather remote, extremely lightly travelled route - it may not be economically feasible to install a guard rail and "stabilize the slope" (which could cost tens of thousands or millions of dollars). Sounds like it is just a back-country dirt road that wasn't designed for through traffic.
Re:Map software problem.. (Score:5, Informative)
I have a Garmin Quest.
Set untarmaced roads to 1mph (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Too obvious to be a solution (Score:5, Informative)
I've holidayed in the area regularly and once you go off the A (main) and B (narrow, usually single-lane) roads, you're on moorland, bogland and are pretty much on your own. While I can't be 100% sure whether I've been down the specific track they're talking about, I have mountain-biked down a few pretty hairy tracks near Crackpot that I know I wouldn't take a car down, specifically the ones that end in a drop, rather than have one at the side...
Re:They really have 2 options: (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=397500&y=
Map (Score:5, Informative)
I guess it's that pale-white track on the bottom left, just below the "Summer Lodge [Farm]" that was mentioned in the article, in which case no GPS system should take you down one of those - white on British OS maps (as opposed to yellow) means no tarmac. And the dotted edges of the road indeed mean "unfenced". Lovely stuff. It's even debatable whether the narrow yellow roads on that map (which mean single-track with passing places) should be used by a GPS as through routes, let alone the white ones!
Still, it reinforces the stupidity of the drivers, as there's obviously a point there, just past the farm, where the character of the road changes, and they blindly believe the GPS rather than turn back and let it find another route.
Re:What worries me.... (Score:3, Informative)
In the UK, a crackpot is more traditionally someone who would be regarded as just past "eccentric". The woman with 86 cats in a one room apartment who yells at you out her window would be a "crackpot".
Stuart
Re:What worries me.... (Score:3, Informative)
as you can see crackpot is somewhere between the yellow road and the red one, presumably its sending them across the gap instead of around because it's shorter even if the track is marked as 10mph, as that's a long way around
Re:Map (Score:2, Informative)
A common misconception, but no, it doesn't. White means unclassified. As in not a Motorway, A road, B road, or a C/D/U depending on local authority classification scheme. There's plenty of white roads with tarmac, try the Old Military Road in north Dartmoor for one, and unless you're on a majorish road, you'll probably find the street you live on is infact white. Is it tarmaced?
Re:They really have 2 options: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually there there is a sign [telegraph.co.uk]. And a five-bar gate: