Phantom roads in rural areas

Phantom roads in rural areas - why does my Garmin 205W think they are
there.

I travel a lot in rural Eastern Oregon and am used to my GPS being somewhat
undependable - not knowing exactly where towns are, etc. People with other
brands of GPS have the same problem.

What is interesting, though, is it often tells me to turn onto roads that
donÿt exist, and never have existed in any way, shape, or form.

For instance, I recently took this trip:

http://www.tripcheck.com/Pages/SBeastSteens.asp

From highway 78, I turned on to the road that leads to Fields, Oregon. The
GPS thinks that Fields is somewhere else, so as I drive down the road, it
is constantly trying to reroute me by having me turn left or right onto
different roads. Some of the roads actually exist, but they are only two
lane tracks, a few hundred yards long, that lead to campsites used by
hunters or hikers. But most of the roads are ´phantom¡ roads, they have
never existed, they arenÿt even animal trails, and certainly arenÿt planned
for the future (if you have ever traveled in this very remote area, you
would know that all of this is true) and yet the 205W thinks they are there
- it even shows them on the map.

Iÿm not complaining. Iÿm just curious as to why the GPS thinks these roads
that never existed are there. Where does it get its mapping information?

Thanks,

Kuskokwim

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010 08:03:32 -0700, Kuskokwim wrote:


They probably appeared on a map at one point. It's not like mapping
companies has gnomes in golf-carts checking their databases.

--
I don't have a sense of humour, merely an over-exaggerated sense of
revenge.
-- Stephen Harris

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010 11:46:16 -0500, Peter H. Coffin wrote:


But what map would that be? None that I have ever seen.

Some of these phantom roads require you drive off a cliff or drive several
thousand feet up a Steens Mountain vertical cliff face.

On Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:28:22 -0700, Kuskokwim wrote:


usually these are gazetted roadways, they have been surveyed but havent
been installed, they are usually a right of way.....

This is more common than a lot of people think.

I live in a much more built-up area than Eastern OR (I'm outside Chicago),
and I can find all sorts of roads in our county's GIS system that have been
platted on paper, but not yet built. Usually this gets resolved when a
housing builder comes along, but out in remote areas, the rights of way
might never get built; they could have been surveyed for some long-forgotten
CCC project!

If Garmin ended up using this sort of GIS data, the roads come along for the
ride.

--

Kristian Zoerhoff
kristian.zoerhoff@gmail.com