Zahlen, bitte! 52 "Deaths caused by GPS"

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is in itself a sophisticated and safe technology for reaching your destination – if you use it correctly. Instead, there are always amusing news stories about the use of navigation systems in cars.

A typo can lead to a couple on their way to Denmark driving to Puttgarten on the island of Rügen instead of Puttgarden on Fehmarn, while an oversight can lead to a Briton ending up in Rome in Germany instead of the Italian metropolis of Rome.

More serious are the cases with tragic outcomes, such as when a ferry is identified as a road connection or someone is sent to a highway exit at a traffic circle with the announcement "next road on the right" and has a fatal accident. This is referred to as "death by GPS". An analysis of 158 incidents shows that many fatal errors can be avoided if more information is available – or can be hidden by the device.

Zahlen, bitte!

In this section, we present amazing, impressive, informative and funny figures ("Zahlen") from the fields of IT, science, art, business, politics and, of course, mathematics every Tuesday. The wordplay "Zahlen, bitte!" for a section about numbers is based on the ambiguity of the German word "Zahlen." On one hand, "Zahlen" can be understood as a noun in the sense of digits and numerical values, which fits the theme of the section. On the other hand, the phrase "Zahlen, bitte!" is reminiscent of a waiter's request in a restaurant or bar when they are asked to bring the bill. Through this association, the section acquires a playful and slightly humorous undertone that catches the readers' attention and makes them curious about the presented numbers and facts.

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Five satellites ideal for GPS navigation

Contact with four satellites is generally sufficient to determine a location with sufficient accuracy. Recently, the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) succeeded in mathematically proving that five satellites are necessary for precise positioning. It is true that even in a small country like Germany there are areas where no or insufficient reception causes problems with GPS.

But otherwise, GPS has proven its worth and saved many lives. In this respect, it may sound shocking when people talk about "death by GPS". On closer inspection, however, it turns out that GPS – does not kill in its non-military use –, but that careless use of an app or navigation system can be fatal.

Scientists from Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Bremen have investigated 158 incidents in which navigation systems were involved in serious accidents in some way. In the process, 52 people were killed and 44 seriously injured. In the corpus, however, they used the LexisNexis database to collect only English-language news items from around the world from 2010 onwards, when navigation systems were largely mature. They analyzed the resulting data using various statistical methods and presented the results to the scientific community (PDF file).

Striking name for incorrect traffic behavior

Perhaps the most important finding is about the nature of the messages: The popularly used term "death by GPS" is mostly a striking abbreviation. After all, it doesn't just apply to the spectacular cases of the couple who were sent on the "shortest route" setting at night in the Nevada desert on a trail that ended in nowhere (case #9 of the corpus). Death by GPS also applies to the cyclist who was hit and killed by a car because the driver was busy using his GPS to find a nearby restaurant.

According to the scientists' analysis, accidents caused by GPS can be avoided above all if the weather conditions and the vehicle's performance are considered. A sports car has to be sent on a different route than a four-wheel drive vehicle. If it has been snowing or raining for hours, less safe side roads would have to disappear from the routes. Conversely, a mode that distinguishes between local and foreign road users and includes or excludes shortcuts would also be conceivable.

The scientists do not consider the risk of incorrect location information to be significant, at least not in terms of accidents. A couple who were sent to the site of a nuclear power plant by the navigation system, entered the site and were arrested for terrorism (case #95) were similarly classified.

The corpus with the 158 collected incidents does not deal with the frequently asked question of whether sat navs make us dumber. Opinions vary widely here – from the recommendation to take a look at the map as well as the device or app to the tip to at least switch off the sat nav on the return journey and thus refresh the inner map with which our spatial thinking works.

The London cab driver study, in which brain scans of new cab drivers were compared with scans of cab drivers who were no longer active or using a sat nav before the state test of knowledge on 25,000 roads, became very well known. The result: when routes are covered using navigation systems, parts of the human brain switch off. Whether there are long-term effects when using navigation systems, whether we are actually getting dumber and dumber, or whether there are differences between map knowledge and orientation at route points, is still being investigated.

Regardless of how you navigate, the most important thing is to keep a cool head between your two ears behind the wheel.

(dahe)