The global positioning system, better known as GPS, is one of those Cold War technological legacies that have proved a boon to millions of people, from long-haul truckers to ranchers keeping a remote eye on distant herds of cattle to medical teams pinpointing the quickest way to and from an accident scene.
GPS, though, is by no means without its shortcomings, one hint of which is the practice of the U.S. military—the first beneficiary of the space-based mapping system, which was made available to civilians around the world on this day 20 years ago, that is, on June 26, 1993—to issue old-fashioned, never-fail compasses to troops in the field on the off chance that something goes awry with those signals from the ether.
Consider a few cases:
In August 2009, the Sacramento Bee reported, a woman was found alive on a remote back road in Death Valley, her six-year-old son sitting dead in the car beside her. She had followed her car’s GPS navigational system down a road that its program had determined was the shortest route between two points of travel. It was indeed, though the road was barely a track and was unsuited for most vehicles. Some GPS databases, a park employee later noted, point to roads that have not been open for more than 40 years, while others cannot distinguish between a trail and a superhighway.
Just so, reported the Canadian information service CBC two winters ago, a young Quebecoise was stranded for three days on a logging road in New Brunswick when her car’s navigational device pointed her down that impassable way. Notes the report, “Experts say New Brunswick poses a particular problem for the GPS because the province has so many dirt roads.” It adds, correctly, “The default setting for most GPS units is to use all roads, regardless of whether they’re paved.”
In safer territory, another GPS database sends visitors seeking to commune at Henry David Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond to a reservoir some miles distant. The insult is minor, injury largely possible only if a visitor is beaned by a golf ball on the course he or she has to cross to get to the body of water by one approach. Reports the New York Times, a ranger on hand kindly tells those whom GPS has sent astray that it’s not the real Walden Pond, though “apparently Thoreau was here at one time.”
In these instances, the error lies not with GPS technology itself, though that technology is indeed vulnerable to unforeseeable phenomena such as surges in sunspot activity, as well as interference from landforms, electronic signals, building materials, and the like. Instead, the problem generally lies with the various interpretations that overlie that technology in the form of those map databases, graphic interfaces, and so forth. An insurance company in Britain, for example, reportedly found that in 2009 alone, some 300,000 collisions or near-collisions could be attributed to inaccuracies in databases of the sort that sent heavy trucks onto inappropriately tiny country lanes or passenger cars the wrong way on a one-way street—all perfectly logical routes from the vantage of space, perhaps, but less so from the ground.
It also lies with the fact that altogether too many users of the technology are overly reliant on it: too many cannot read a map to save their lives (as reading a map so often does), too many sally forth into difficult terrain assuming that technology alone will somehow keep them safe—and that somehow technology owes them this safety. Not long ago, for instance, a skier ventured away from the groomed trails of a Wyoming ski resort and got lost. Writes the mountaineer and adventurer David Roberts, the unfortunate man was able to send a distress call on his cell phone but died of hypothermia before help could arrive. His heirs, Roberts adds, filed suit against the search-and-rescue team. The logic, one supposes, is that because the man had the requisite technology, he should have been guaranteed survival.
There are deliberate human-caused GPS failures as well. Criminal gangs, for instance, use GPS jamming technology to block efforts to track auto theft, as do publicity-shy celebrities seeking to keep paparazzi from their doors. But, as with so much of the technological, most true errors fall on the operator, and as we become more reliant on technology over experience and acquired knowledge, we leave ourselves ever more vulnerable to failure. In an illuminating essay, the Canadian writer Alex Hutchinson observes that Inuit teenagers are no longer learning traditional navigational techniques that are essential to survival in the Arctic, just as more and more of their peers to the south cannot locate Indonesia or even Texas on a map. Thus, to put it another way, if geographic mishaps are to be had, then geographic ignorance will often be behind them.
The lesson to be learned? The manufacturers of navigational devices quietly note that all databases contain errors, and therefore insist that their products are to be used as “navigational aids” only. As an addict of the iPad and its trove of electronic maps while on the road, I have to remind myself of this as well, particularly when seeking sneaky end-runs around traffic and construction in unfamiliar country. Let us by all means use navigational devices, then, but beware when their turn-by-turn instructions steer us into obviously hostile territory—down a staircase, say, or onto a dirt road high in the Rocky Mountains. Caveat viator, then: let the traveler beware.