Brew: You pick up your phone, set a destination, and press start.
Instantly, you get the shortest path,
and without thinking about it, you follow.
Before you know it, it's too late.
You've already made that wrong turn that just ended your life.
Many of us use Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze to get around.
It’s convenient, saves time and prevents you from getting lost…
Howard: Turn right.
Brew: But at what cost?
GPS navigation is accurate most of the time, but it only
takes one tiny mistake for your next trip to be your last.
For Alicia and Carlos Sanchez, the shortest path
turned into the deadliest path they could ever imagine.
It was leading them into an unforgivable death trap.
Was there a way to avoid it?
August 1st, 2009.
Alicia Sanchez, her 11-year old son Carlos, and their dog found
out the hard way what happens when your GPS loses its way.
The trio left Las Vegas on August 1st heading into Death Valley National
Park, seemingly prepared with plenty of supplies including a 24-pack of
water bottles, some cheese sandwiches, and pop-tarts with the intention
of coming back the following day after an overnight camping trip.
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Right before they left, Alicia told her family that they wanted to
see Scotty’s Castle and Ubehebe Crater on the North side of the park.
The travellers took Owl Hole Spring Road, a disused road
that leads from Death Valley to the Owlshead Mountains.
Shortly after turning onto the road, her car suffered a flat tire.
Being a rudimentary problem, Alicia climbed out of
her car, and quickly fixed it up, leaving the flat
lying on the ground nearby, next to a bottle of water.
Those two items would eventually save her life.
Once the Jeep was up and running again, they set out once more,
following the 30 mile road almost to the end, at which point her
GPS directed her to an unexpected left turn down an unmarked trail.
Not really knowing the area, she followed the
directions, even if the trail wasn’t the best drive.
Soon, there was no turning back.
It was the beginning of a 5-day nightmare
that would soon turn into tragedy.
Just ahead was a final death trap.
Not long after the turn, their Jeep fell into an animal
burrow, wedging it into the ground and trapping them in place.
Waiting for help with just a handful of water bottles in
one of the hottest places on Earth, things looked dire.
Desperate to contact help, Alicia climbed to a
higher point to see if she could catch a cell signal.
It was all for naught though, she couldn’t get
a single bar, and nobody was coming to help.
In the following days, temperatures in the park rose
up to 119 degrees Fahrenheit, or 48 degrees Celsius.
By Wednesday August 5th, their 4th day in the desert heat, supplies
were running low, and Alicia’s family called local authorities
informing them that they hadn’t heard back from her since Saturday.
In the late afternoon, around 5 pm, the search began.
Alicia had given her family conflicting information.
She told them that they were camping at some free
campgrounds at the South end, but wanted to see Scotty’s
Castle and Ubehebe Crater in the North end of the park.
Rangers Matt Martin and Aaron Shandor, checked campgrounds
in the Panamint Mountains, and other campgrounds near
Furnace creek, however both came back empty handed.
A full scale search was ordered at first light on Thursday the 6th.
A helicopter was scrambled from China Lake Naval
Air Station, and in conjunction with ground support,
began a search from the South end of the park.
At 10 am, park ranger Amber Nattrass found a tire
rim alongside a flat tire, next to a bottle of water.
Finding only a single set of tire tracks in the sand, she came
to the conclusion that whoever had been driving there left the
established roadway, driving out into uncharted wilderness.
Nattrass followed the tire tracks further
until she found the Jeep about an hour later.
By the time she arrived, Alicia was conscious, but dealing with severe
dehydration and exposure to the harsh light of the California sun.
Carlos, her son, hadn’t survived.
The search helicopter arrived on the scene moments
after, and began providing Sanchez with medical help
before bringing her to Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas.
Her dog was relinquished into the care of the sheriff’s deputies, and
her son to the San Bernardino County coroner’s office for an autopsy.
It’s an unbearable tragedy, but what could have possibly driven her to
stray off the path into the wild, uncharted land, away from the highway?
Following Alicia’s return to civilization, questions
were raised about why and how she drove off the beaten
path, and onto paths her vehicle couldn’t handle.
Alicia relied on a GPS system to navigate the dirt trails of the
Death Valley, yet the navigation led her into the middle of nowhere.
One of the main concerns raised after this disaster is how
GPS is shaping the way we navigate the world around us.
What happens when your GPS navigation leads you down the wrong path?
Howard: Recalculating…
Brew: To understand why this sort of thing happens, and how GPS
navigation works, it’s important to understand where GPS came from.
GPS originated in the Cold War when The United States
Navy wanted a way to track their nuclear submarines.
Using 6 satellites, they would measure changes
in the Doppler effect to find the sub’s location.
The Doppler effect is like how the sound of
a car changes pitch as it drives past you.
As an object that emits noise moves through space, the sound waves
bunch up at the front of it, increasing the pitch of that sound.
As it passes by you, the waves lengthen and the pitch lowers.
This works the same for radio signals, you can measure distance
by looking at the differences in wave patterns of a radio signal.
As a radio signal moves over time, the wave lengthens, and
you can measure distance using the length of the waves.
Starting in the 70s, the Department of Defense wanted to build a far
more robust system for navigation, but that required more satellites.
So they launched the first NAVSTAR satellite in 1978, and
by 1993 the entire 24 satellite system was ready for use.
GPS today is composed of 31 different satellites that orbit the
Earth at a distance of around 20,200 kilometres above the surface.
27 of these satellites are in operation, transmitting data around the
world, while the remaining 4 are redundancies in case something breaks.
At any point on Earth you should be in the range of at
least 4 satellites at any time to find your location,
however, for accuracy you also need perfect timing.
And the only way to get capital P, italics, bolded,
underlined, PERFECT timing, is to use an atomic clock.
These clocks can tell the time within 3 billionths of a second,
which is important for pinpointing your location because, if
you have the exact time a message was sent, and when it was
received, you can measure the distance using the speed of light.
It’s kinda like throwing a rock down a deep
pit and waiting for it to hit the bottom.
You can gauge the depth by measuring the time it takes to hear the echo.
That makes sense, but why do we need 4
satellites to find our position on Earth?
Howard: Turn left.
Brew: It’s because the only information a single satellite
can provide is distance— all it can do is place you
somewhere along the circumference of a circle around itself.
With a second satellite, you can measure
your distance between two of these circles.
Creating something akin to a Venn diagram.
There are only 2 points at which you are the exact same distance
from the centre of both circles, where the circumferences overlap.
With a third satellite, you have a third point at which you are
equally distant to the centres of all three circles, and the triangle
shaped space at the centre of all three circles is your location.
That’s why they call it “triangulation”.
The 4th satellite helps pin down your exact location
by correcting for errors in the atomic clocks,
atmospheric interference, or interference from buildings.
At the time GPS was first developed for the military, regulations
required civilian GPS units location only within 100 metres.
But nowadays, most GPS units you can buy are
able to find your location within 15 metres.
Pretty neat!
So that’s how GPS satellites find your location, but how
does a GPS service, like Google Maps, Waze and Apple Maps,
actually come up with routes from point A to point B?
And how can they lead you astray?
For that, let’s turn to another tragedy, this time out of Russia.
Two 18 year old teenagers, Sergey Ustinov and Vladislav Istomin
were taking a trip from Yakutsk, known as one of the World’s
coldest cities, to the port of Magadan on the East coast.
The duo set out debating whether to use Google Maps, or a Russian navigation service, Yandex Maps.
Comparing routes from the two services, the two men found that
Google Maps managed to shave off about 200 kilometres off the
route Yandex calculated, from a 1,900 kilometre trip along the
Kolyma federal highway, to a trip just over 1,700 kilometres.
Unfortunately for Sergey and Vladislav, not only is the region the
world’s coldest, the road Google Maps sent them down is known locally as
the “Road of Bones”, passing through a rural municipality called Tomtor.
The highway was built during the Stalinist years by political
prisoners, resulting in the loss of over a quarter of a million lives.
Despite that immense sacrifice, it’s been abandoned since the 1970s.
When the two boys set out on the trip, they neglected to bring
warm clothing for the intense cold, not even a winter coat.
They both had sneakers on instead of winter boots.
This became deadly when they became trapped on the
road, and the car radiator was punctured by a wooden
spike hidden underneath the deep, unrelenting snowfall.
It’s unclear how long Sergey and Vladislav were
stuck before the rescue arrived, but it wasn’t quick
enough, and they were stranded for several days.
Without anything to keep them warm, the two men rapidly began to
succumb to the severe cold, frostbite setting into their extremities.
They were too far from cell service towers to call for help, and
despite attempts to keep warm by building a small fire by burning a car
tire, they had no winter clothing and the cold quickly overtook them.
When they were found, Vladislav’s legs and arms were acutely frostbitten.
A doctor treating him said that “his condition is
extremely grave, we are fighting for his life”.
Sergey on the other hand didn’t need to fight anymore, as
when authorities found them, he was already frozen solid.
Help had eventually found them, but only when a police
officer went to Tomtor looking for the duo after a sighting.
Locals were surprised to hear that the two didn’t have any winter clothes.
One resident said “Now it is very cold here, not yet -60C but at night and
in the morning it reaches -57C, and during the day it warms up to -51C.”
Setting aside the tendency for young men to forgo
precautions, if their car hadn’t broken down on the road,
then in all likelihood, Sergey might still be alive today.
But the question is, why did Google Maps
send them down an abandoned, dangerous route?
It all comes down to how navigation services generate routes.
Companies like Google, Waze, Apple Maps, Garmin, and Yandex all
need to calculate the shortest route from point A to point B.
To do so, they generally use algorithms like
Dijkstra’s shortest path, or the A* algorithm.
Dijkstra’s algorithm was conceived in a short 20
minutes at a cafe in Amsterdam, and was made to find
the shortest path between two points on a graph.
In this case, a graph looks like this.
There are two variables in this graph, nodes, which are
destinations; and edges, which are the roads and paths to get there.
The algorithm then adds up the numbers on the edges, which
are the distances for every path from your start to end point.
Say we want to get from home at node 3 to work at node 0,
Dijkstra’s algorithm looks at the values of the
edges between our start node, and the next node.
The distance to node 1 is shorter than node 2, so the algorithm
marks the path from node 3 to node 1 as “visited”, before
repeating the process until it arrives at the final destination.
Imagine the nodes 1 and 2 on the graph are pins you’ve placed on
Google maps as you try to find the quickest way to drive to work.
They could be anything from shops, to street
intersections, a highway on-ramp, or other geography.
The edges would be roads and streets, and the values
assigned based on a number of factors including:
distance, traffic, speed limit, among other things.
I should say though, map services like Google Maps and Yandex are
very complex and likely have millions of nodes all over the place.
Navigation through bustling cities is far more complicated
than finding the shortest route between 4 points.
But, I hope you get the concept.
The A* algorithm works very similarly.
It also evaluates the shortest route between two nodes, but
also estimates what it will cost to get to the next node.
Dijkstra’s algorithm will go down every single path until
it finds the shortest one, even if it’s inefficient.
It’s a problem mathematicians call “Greedy Best-First-Search”.
It’ll take the path of least resistance, even if it’s not
the best route, whereas the A* algorithm thinks ahead.
Imagine you’re standing on one side of a
field, and you need to get to the other side.
However, a U shaped fence is blocking the way.
Dijkstra’s algorithm would head directly toward
its destination until it’s blocked by the fence.
Only then would it turn to go around the fence.
The A* algorithm is smart enough to see that going the direct route
isn’t the fastest route, and would go around in the first place.
But the problem with these systems is that they’re not human, and most
often than not, human activity changes before we can update our systems.
Buildings are abandoned, bridges are closed for repairs, new
roads are built, and unless Google, Yandex, etc updates their
maps, you can find yourself having to do a U-turn while driving.
Howard: Make a U-turn.
Brew: Humans can make judgments in the moment,
but computers only care if the math adds up.
You may be happy to know that only days after Sergey and
Vladislav were found freezing to death on the Road of Bones,
Google Maps removed that road from its pathfinding to make
sure it would never direct anyone down that road again.
Yandex Maps had told them to go the long way, likely because the
mapmakers in Russia knew how dangerous and disused that highway was.
American cartographers and programmers behind Google Maps
were likely unaware of how dangerous that roadway was,
and simply put it into their system like any other road.
There are other instances of GPS systems directing
people down one way roads, or into oncoming traffic.
A 17 year old New Jersey native made an illegal left turn
into oncoming traffic after his GPS told him “turn left”.
Instead of watching road signage which would have indicated
the left turn lane coming up after the intersection, he
simply swung into traffic triggering a 4 car pile up.
Another New Jersey woman in 2011 turned left onto a dirt road into a
head-on collision with another vehicle after her GPS told her to turn left.
Even though the medical centre she was driving to was
on her right, she obeyed her GPS without question.
Regardless of what service we use to navigate the World, it’s paramount
that we use our judgement to make sure that we’re still being safe.
In the past, it was well understood that
maps didn’t fully represent our world.
Many maps from the age of exploration featured
dragons lurking in parts we hadn’t explored yet.
Maps weren’t meant to help us get to the milkshake bar
uptown, but to help us understand where we were, not only
geographically, but also spiritually and politically.
It just goes to show that the mapmaker has much more control over
where we go, and how we navigate the World than we do ourselves.
You wouldn’t skip a coffee shop if Google told you to, right?
Right!?
At the end of the day, the best way to keep ourselves safe when we’re
out on the road is to always follow road rules before anything else,
not following the GPS blindly, pay attention to your surroundings
while using our judgement, and to make sure you know what route
you’re taking beforehand to avoid being led down the wrong path.
Howard: Your destination is ahead on the right.
Brew: Shout out to GPS, I’d be lost without it.
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