Category: Pointless Digressions || By

Alert Reader Officer Jim writes:

I have a friend who works for EchoStar, so I brought up their website to get an address for the McKeesport call center:

For those of you who aren't from Our Fair City, that's in a residential neighborhood behind Propel McKeesport school ... only about a mile from the real EchoStar facility.

It gets better. If you manually type EchoStar's mailing address of "Industry Drive, McKeesport, Pa" into Google! Maps, the website sends you to Elizabeth Township.

This is hardly a new problem with online mapping programs. Three years ago, the Almanac noted that Yahoo! Maps was still sending people across McKeesport's Fifth Avenue bridge ... about 60 years after it was demolished and replaced by the Jerome Avenue Bridge.

. . .

Luckily, neither of these errors is likely to get anyone injured or killed. But those satellite navigation devices use the same data as maps generated by Google and Yahoo.

Last month, a California man was driving through the New York City suburbs, following the directions fed to him by the satellite navigation system in his rental car. Reports the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Journal, as 32-year-old Bo Bai was driving over a railroad crossing, the automated GPS voice told him to turn right, and the results were right out of the Keystone Kops:

Bai got stuck, tried unsuccessfully to reverse and finally abandoned the 2006 Ford Focus minutes before it was slammed by a northbound Metro-North Harlem Line train, MTA police said.

The car was pushed more than 100 feet during the fiery crash.

No one was injured but about 500 passengers were stranded for more than two hours and 250 feet of electrified third rail was damaged. Three trains out of Grand Central Terminal were canceled and 10 others delayed by up to 90 minutes. The damage was repaired by 2:30 a.m.

(One of the cops from the railroad's police department gave the newspaper what might be the quote of the year: "He tried to stop the train by waving his arms, which apparently was not totally effective in slowing the train." No, not so much.)

Bai is not being charged with any moving violations "but will be held liable for the damage to the train and track, as well as other costs and loss of revenue," the newspaper says.

. . .
It goes to show that when it comes to driving around an unfamiliar area, technology isn't everything. A paper map might be a cheaper, safer alternative.

On second thought, maybe we should all just stay home: A few years ago, an acquaintance was trying to find her way from one part of Pennsylvania to another using a Rand McNally road atlas.

I suggested some different routes before she said, "Why can't I take this road? It goes right there."

She pointed to a squiggly blue line.

Yeah, it was a river.