The GPS reroute that ate 40 minutes of my Tuesday in Portland

I was driving to a job site on the east side and my map app kept telling me to dodge a supposed accident that did not exist. After the third reroute I ended up in a dead end near the airport, and by the time I got back on the main road it took an extra 40 minutes. I checked the traffic feed later and the alert was from some user report that never got verified. Has anyone else had their commute wrecked by a false algorithm flag, or is this just my luck?

2 comments

2 Comments

henryp4029d ago

Man, that user report thing is such a pain. I had the same deal last month where someone flagged a "lane closure" that turned out to be a parked delivery truck that was already gone by the time I got there. The app kept rerouting me for a solid 20 minutes through back streets that were worse than the main road. They really need to just ignore those random pings unless multiple people confirm it or a camera sees it. One person with a slow phone can mess up a whole afternoon for hundreds of drivers.

rose_reed1mo ago

Take that user report thing seriously, I've had the same thing happen twice now where someone flags a crash that was just a fender bender already pulled over. It's wild how one unverified alert can send three different apps down the same wrong path. Maybe it's just me but I feel like these apps need to weigh official traffic data way more than random user pings.