Sat-navs need common sense
23/06/08 19:32 Filed in: Comment
We've all heard the story about
satellite navigation systems that have
encouraged artics into impenetrable situations in vilalges and
drivers, who really should have more sense, to try to take their
Ford Fiestas through four-foot deep rivers. They are great but you
should not just blindly believe them! You still should exercise the
common sense you were born with!
I really am a big fan of sat-navs. In a strange town they are great at helping you to concentrate on traffic, pedestrians and all the other things you should be looking for as they calmly tell you where to go. If you find yourself in the wrong lane and unable to change, don't worry, the sat-nav will find a way to re-route you.
If you are on a motorway and see standing traffic in the distance, you can dive off at the next junction and let the sat nav help you find a way along the B-roads and back to your destination.
Sat-navs are getting better and they leave the driver to focus on the job in hand
Plus, these days many come with built-in phone handsfree, live traffic update and speed camera information and even an MP3 player. What more could you want.
In the early days all sat-navs were fiddly to use. You basically needed to spend about 15 minutes, before you even set out, to input the destination. Along came touch screen systems, which, at least, make it more intuitive to input the destination address. Now the latest car-mounted sat-navs are also touch screen and have a screen that is actually a viewable, usable size.
But you still have plenty of foibles to watch out for.
On my daily commute, sat-navs invariably want to take straight to the most fearsome traffic blackspot to spend half an hour burning fuel in a queue. Only when you are most of the way home on the by-ways do they suddenly twig that, yes, you can go home that way.
Then you have the confusing way they sometimes announce junctions. Usually when you look back on what you were told (while finding some double back in a network of one-way streets to try to get back on course) the announcement was correct, when considered as pure logic!
Next comes the problem with new roads, new one-way streets and new junctions. Not that there are many of the former, or latter, as our roads building programme is all but at a standstill due to the pressure of environmentalists who, it seems, would like to encourage waste of fuel and localised pollution caused by vehicles sitting in a queue going nowhere.
Then you get the occasional programming glitch.
I remember the first time I encountered one of these several years ago. I was heading to a meeting. I had dutifully entered the street name and the town. Half way there the car's sat-nav told me I must take a B-road on the left, despite the fact that I knew my destination was straight ahead on the trunk road.
Investigating after the meeting, I discovered that every time you programmed in the street name and town, it set the destination as a street of the same name in another town 20 miles distant!
Then there is the draughty hotel that I discovered near Aberdeen. The poor unfortunate Ardoe House hotel on Royal Deeside, is - according to all the sat-navs I have recently tried - in an empty field about a mile from its true location! Oops!
I really am a big fan of sat-navs. In a strange town they are great at helping you to concentrate on traffic, pedestrians and all the other things you should be looking for as they calmly tell you where to go. If you find yourself in the wrong lane and unable to change, don't worry, the sat-nav will find a way to re-route you.
If you are on a motorway and see standing traffic in the distance, you can dive off at the next junction and let the sat nav help you find a way along the B-roads and back to your destination.
Sat-navs are getting better and they leave the driver to focus on the job in hand
Plus, these days many come with built-in phone handsfree, live traffic update and speed camera information and even an MP3 player. What more could you want.
In the early days all sat-navs were fiddly to use. You basically needed to spend about 15 minutes, before you even set out, to input the destination. Along came touch screen systems, which, at least, make it more intuitive to input the destination address. Now the latest car-mounted sat-navs are also touch screen and have a screen that is actually a viewable, usable size.
But you still have plenty of foibles to watch out for.
On my daily commute, sat-navs invariably want to take straight to the most fearsome traffic blackspot to spend half an hour burning fuel in a queue. Only when you are most of the way home on the by-ways do they suddenly twig that, yes, you can go home that way.
Then you have the confusing way they sometimes announce junctions. Usually when you look back on what you were told (while finding some double back in a network of one-way streets to try to get back on course) the announcement was correct, when considered as pure logic!
Next comes the problem with new roads, new one-way streets and new junctions. Not that there are many of the former, or latter, as our roads building programme is all but at a standstill due to the pressure of environmentalists who, it seems, would like to encourage waste of fuel and localised pollution caused by vehicles sitting in a queue going nowhere.
Then you get the occasional programming glitch.
I remember the first time I encountered one of these several years ago. I was heading to a meeting. I had dutifully entered the street name and the town. Half way there the car's sat-nav told me I must take a B-road on the left, despite the fact that I knew my destination was straight ahead on the trunk road.
Investigating after the meeting, I discovered that every time you programmed in the street name and town, it set the destination as a street of the same name in another town 20 miles distant!
Then there is the draughty hotel that I discovered near Aberdeen. The poor unfortunate Ardoe House hotel on Royal Deeside, is - according to all the sat-navs I have recently tried - in an empty field about a mile from its true location! Oops!