Increased traffic on country road.

[JimRB]

We have friends in Colorado with a few thousand acres. GPS sends people through their land on a long since abandoned wagon trail road. Wagons haven't been used in over a hundred years. They have signs suggesting private property, gps is wrong and such. Wagon trail is sort of there, cattle fences, horse fences, washes and all. Not really sure if people really get far following the gps or they guess it might be a private ranch.

 

[Will S]

Have several "official" looking signs that read:"Pot holes and broken pavement next 6 miles. Use preferred parallel route xxx"

or something along those lines. Attempting to discourage them almost any other way, probably will not work.

 

[MossRoad]

My bet is on the WAZE app.

Waze - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If you ever speak to someone again on your road, ask them if they’d mind telling you what app sent them there.

 

[CalG]

I've got one of these nearby

With that, Our town has many miles of unused town right of ways. Some go though property owner's front door yard.

They make for great motorbike or e-bike rides! " This will only take a second, I won't linger" ;-)

 

[oosik]

For quite a while - a mapping company showed my driveway as a county road. BOY - was that ever a joy!!! Took three years - finally got it corrected.

Many use a "mapping app" to plan a trip. It can then be transferred to some form of GPS. Both the mapping app and the GPS have a feature that allows you to choose the type of route.

You can select - fastest, most scenic, shortest, past most historic attractions, etc, etc. Many do not know of this feature. My Garmin GX60S defaults to - fastest. The GPS feature on the Taco Wagon defaults to - shortest.

Look out - - here I come down your skinny country road!!!!

 

[seville009]

In my travels, i have passed by Amazon warehouses where they have a sign on the road saying something like “truckers ignore gps” and additional directional signs for them.

 

[Jchonline]

It might be a tiny bit shorter but not enough to matter. I suppose that even if it is a few yards shorter some Google AI shows it that way.

It is just strange that it happened all of a sudden so it almost has to be Google or Apple.

I bet if you go to the nearest large highway and google to that town, it will show the route through your road. That probably wasnt happening before...but some person in a google car has driven down your road and now its in their possible route database.

 

[jigs_n_fixtures]

The major gps providers, will let road owners annotate their roads with seasonal and emergency closures, not plowed in winter etc. At least they did 13-years ago, and most of the forest roads are still reflecting what we put in then. And I think the fire managers still have some way to let the mapping companies know about fire closures.

Your county roads department might be able to get it listed as light duty, no truck, or some other status which would keep mapping software from recommending it.

 

[ponytug]

A few years back a large RV got stuck on our local road because their (non-RV/non-truck) GPS routed them up our road. After helping them get towed out, I asked the county roads department to put up a warning notice for large vehicles/campers/rvs/trailers that it wasn't a recommended route.

Result: nice highly visible sign just before the last turn that commits a vehicle. But! It turns out that there are enough GPS centric / oblivious drivers to not pay attention to road signs. We still see tandem semi-wreckers head out every couple of months to haul some poor semi driver and their rig out of a hairpin that the have gotten themselves jammed into.

You can contact the various map sources (Google/Apple/Tomtom/Garmin, etc.) and let them know about the road issues, but it can take awhile. I have an issue with one map provider that insists that a local private driveway is a road; we are at three tries and 18 months and counting on getting that corrected.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Torvy]

It seems that part of the problem is the map programs do not have a setting for vehicle type...at least not one for trucks. That would be a good upgrade. Some roads recommended are not passable by trucks, even in the city.