Crowd Sourcing Map Details?

The other day my hus­band and I nearly missed an early morn­ing cross-country flight because our shut­tle dri­ver got lost in a pre-dawn maze of vil­lage streets. His ini­tial mis­take occurred when his GPS unit directed him to take a road that all the locals know is nav­i­ga­ble only by 4-wheel drive vehi­cles with high clear­ances. Impas­si­ble for some­one dri­ving a large pas­sen­ger sedan like him.

He got him­self thor­oughly lost, quite lit­er­ally in the woods, and hav­ing lost faith in his GPS, had dif­fi­culty mak­ing his way to our pick-up loca­tion. By the time he called us for help, his emo­tional state made it dif­fi­cult for him to make sense of our ver­bal instruc­tions. And we were on the verge of panic about mak­ing our flight from Boston, given the rush-hour traf­fic we’d now to have fight.

Every­one in this Cape Cod vil­lage has known for more than a decade that most of the printed (and now dig­i­tal) maps of this area are erro­neous. Sadly, now these errors are get­ting repli­cated, pub­lished dig­i­tally, and dis­trib­uted via GIS down­loads to Garmin and other nav­i­ga­tion devices. (I cite this Cape Cod venue as one exam­ple of a recur­ring problem.)

Twice in the past week while dri­ving through cities on a major inter­state high­way, I’ve been given bad advice by my Garmin device. In both cases I ignored it because I hap­pened to know the area well enough to real­ize the nav­i­ga­tion direc­tions made no sense at all. Human intel­li­gence over­rode the sys­tem based on prior expe­ri­ence. Had I taken action on the GPS system’s advice, I would have wasted time and gas, and quite prob­a­bly got­ten lost in both cities where this sit­u­a­tion occurred. Need­less to say, I now lis­ten to the device with con­sid­er­able skep­ti­cism about its accu­racy and credibility.

So the ques­tion is, how can peo­ple cor­rect known mis­takes in the map­ping sys­tems that pro­vide bad direc­tions or send peo­ple down miss­ing or unnav­i­ga­ble streets? Is there a crowd-sourcing solu­tion? And if so, how can the infor­ma­tion be validated?

Image cour­tesy of Google Earth: Cape Cod vil­lages can be dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate even with the help of GPS units.

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