Oct 13 2008
Did You Call Me An Ashnola?
A couple of months ago, I got a Garmin Nuvi 250 GPS unit. A number of friends and co-workers have this units and rave about them, so I was excited when I got mine.
So far, it’s worked great. When I was working in an area that I was not very familiar with, it showed me all sorts of routes that I never would have thought of, even when looking at a map.
Now, there are a couple drawbacks to having the GPS unit. First, I’ve discovered that the maps aren’t always accurate. For example, streets have been created in reality, that are not reflected in the maps of the unit. This is easy to get around. The other issue is spelling of some street names..
Now, Garmin does warn about this. In fact, here is exactly what they say..
One of the goals of Garmin is to provide customers with the most complete and accurate cartography that is available to us at a reasonable cost. We use a combination of governmental and private data sources, which we identify in product literature and copyright messages displayed to the consumer. Virtually all data sources contain some inaccurate or incomplete data. In some countries, complete and accurate map information is either not available or is prohibitively expensive.
I can understand and respect that. While in Vancouver, it seems to be very accurate, aside from newer streets missing, the spelling of the street names is fine. While I was in Abbotsford (an area with less population), it was fairly good. Some streets were misspelled, but overall it was good..
This weekend, my family and I drove up to Penticton for Thanksgiving. We were heading up Highway 3, when I looked at the Garmin and noticed the next street that we would intersect, a few kilometers ahead.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading.. I asked my wife to look, and she burst out laughing. How had we missed this street, in all the years of us driving up and down the highway?
What?!?!? Asshole River Rd?
It turns out that the actual street name is Ashnola River Road. It did provide us with plenty of entertainment for the weekend, with my wife and I occasionally calling each other an ashnola…
Having the exact same unit I can tell you that they’re indeed great, but not perfect.
In Calgary ours was convinced we were driving through a forest at one point since the road had been rebuilt and shifted slightly to the north. It tried fruitlessly for about 10 minutes to route us south on every little logging road and bicycle trail it could find.
In Banff it seemed to want to take us on an endless loop in a residential area.
In Regina it took us southwest through 20 minutes of residential (not fun with a 30′ trailer in tow) to reach a Science Center we wanted to visit….instead of taking us west to the main southbound highway which passed within feet of the centers parking lot and had an exit about .2K south of the center.
All that said, as much as I used to be quite comfortable navigating by paper maps, it’s certainly a unit that borders indispensable now.