Discussion: navigation by Microsoft

For a lesson in navigation:
- visit MSN MapPoint;
- enter the following:
Start: Norway, city Haugesund
End: Norway, city Trondheim
- "Get Directions"
Enjoy (until they fix it...)

Cool! I wish I have time to take this trip :)

They just made a 180 degree error starting out from Haugesund. It happens.

yeah, but it shouldn't take 6 countries to figure out your error and relocate. Most of us would suspect a problem when we hit great britain :-)

You should leave the "Scenic Route" option unchecked in the future Will.

If you choose "shortest route", it only takes you to Britain and back.

Funny thing is, if you ask for reverse directions it takes you by a direct route.

I could more or less figure out what I'd see just based on reading this thread. But it was still pretty fun to type it in and watch the result come back :)

Yesterday, on the way from Oak Mt, AL, just south of Birmingham, to the airport, we decided to check out the Vulcan Statue atop Red Mt overlooking B'ham. Good thing we were following Charlie. Using the rental car "NeverLost" Magellen gps system, JJ plugged in VU and up popped Vulcan Statue with the appropriate address for B'ham, but it was 739 miles away!!! Zooming the map out to see where the designated route led, we would have been taken to S FL near Ft Meyers. Interesting but annoying as her voice (it was a she machine) kept saying "Please go to the designated route!" So beware of directions in tech clothes;-}

Looks like they probably have one bad mileage value in some critical spot that makes it tough to get out of Haugesund. Short trips are okay, and if you piece together a trip out of a couple of segments, it works okay. But Haugesund is on kind of a dead-end peninsula, and when you go for a long enough trip, it must switch over to using the major-city distances, of which it looks like there is only one out of Haugesund, if you ignore the ferries. If that value is screwed up, then the ferry route pops up instead. Once you get to Newcastle, it likely is true that the fastest route goes through all those countries, assuming the ferry to Trondheim is slow. But Haugesund to Skjold works, as does Skjold to wherever. So I guess they aren't running triangle inequality checks on their database. And since it works okay in reverse the travel times must be bidirectional, which makes sense.

It could also be that they have a map error, which says that the way into Haugesund is a one-way road.

To save y'all from actually typing this in, and for archival purposes, here's a link to a blog whence this originally came. Also some links to earlier (Expedia) map errors>, such as the following unfortunately no longer functional):
From: Laurel, Maryland
To: Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Maryland
Driving Distance: 5865.1 miles
Time: 9 day(s) 3 hour(s) 22 minute(s)
Driving Directions
Time Instruction
0:00 Depart Laurel, Maryland
1:01 Entering Delaware
1:17 Entering New Jersey
3:24 Entering New York
3:51 Entering Connecticut
5:51 Entering Massachusetts
7:29 Entering New Hampshire
7:44 Entering Maine
12:20 Entering New Brunswick
20:20 Take the North Sydney-Argentia Ferry
34:32 Entering Newfoundland
36:35 Turn left onto Local road(s) (4543.1 mi)
219:22 Arrive Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Maryland

Made it into major Norwegian newspaper today:

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article955...

It looks like it has now been fixed.