Tag Archives: astray

Google doesn’t always know best. Despite warnings to avoid travel after a massive snowstorm that started Christmas weekend closed major highways, thousands of people insisted on trying to drive into or out of the socked-in Sierra Nevada.   Some needed to get home. Some wanted to visit family. Some just wanted to play in the snow. Some were led astray by poor judgement. And many were led astray by Google Maps, which offered alternate driving routes that sent drivers to snowy dead ends.

It appears that Google Maps may have guided weary Lake Tahoe travelers to closed-off and even dangerous roads amid record-setting snowfall. Social media posts, including from Crystal Kolden, a professor of forest sciences at UC Merced, have condemned the service for redirecting travelers away from closed highways to potentially precarious shortcuts. “This is an abject failure,” tweeted Kolden Monday evening. “You are sending people up a poorly maintained forest road to their death in a… Source link