By Charles Miller
This week I am still in Houston, Texas, driving unfamiliar freeways and city streets with the aid of the voice narration of driving directions on my cellphone. I named the disembodied voice Chatty Cathy. Eventually, she gets me to the hospital, where my brother remains incarcerated, but not without having some good-natured fun along the way.
Now that I know, for the most part, the general route to my destination, I spend more time listening to Chatty’s directions, while ignoring many of them. She still has the annoying habit of trying to steer me toward paid toll roads over other routes. She says, “Turn left onto the toll road,” and when I keep driving straight, she says, “Make a U-turn; then turn right onto the toll road.” Her voice is never angry, just persistent.
Some tech-oriented web sites I follow have discussed the technology employed by navigation systems. There is two-way feedback, so after a few hundred drivers ignore Chatty Cathy’s instructions, the system will analyze why so many people are doing so, then possibly stop recommending that particular turn. The artificial intelligence engine powering the system is also supposed to be capable of using input from live surveillance cameras to look for conditions such as road construction and so forth. There must not have been any cameras where Chatty told me to turn into oncoming traffic on a freeway exit ramp last week.
The navigation database used by all the mapping apps has access to location data from millions of cellphones. In real-time, the navigation system can determine if dozens of cellphones are moving at 75 mph on the same stretch of road and discern from this data that the freeway is open. When the data shows the phones moving at 15 mph, that is usually is a traffic pileup, and the map displays the road, colored red, to indicate trouble. Displaying that information in real-time on the map can be helpful if driving with a co-pilot riding shotgun, but when driving solo, it is not recommended to take your eyes off the road for long enough to make use of the map.
When Chatty says, “Take the next exit to avoid traffic congestion ahead,” that is not always good advice. At the same time that Chatty is sharing this advice with me, she also told the secret to hundreds of other drivers who do the exact same thing, which can result in the recommended detour also becoming slow. Sometimes it is better to just wait it out on the freeway.
There is an amusing video found on YouTube by German prankster Simon Weckert, where he confounds the navigation system by using a little red wagon that he loaded with almost 100 cellphones to create fake traffic jams. The video shows him walking down the middle of deserted streets in Berlin while towing his red wagon. Simultaneously, the video shows the map on his cellphone reporting an epic traffic jam at his location. Far from being upset, Google said, “We appreciate seeing creative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work better over time.”
Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981, and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at email FAQ8@ SMAguru.com.
