• Car struck by train: A vehicle stuck on the railroad track near Wing and State streets late Friday afternoon was struck by a passing Union Pacific train. The driver told police she was driving eastbound along Wing, when her Global Positioning Satellite unit told to make a right turn. She turned onto the train tracks and proceeded to drive about 30 feet until her car got stuck in the snow. No one was inside the vehicle at the time of the accident. Police said they made several attempts to contact Union Pacific authorities, but they could not be reached. The train was able to slow down considerably before it struck the rear of the car, sending it about 30 feet off the tracks.
She should have her license revoked for that one. Another 70 feet and she would have been turning on State St and not the railroad tracks. My, that is a funny looking stop light and why does it have a bell? I wonder, if the GPS had not told her to turn, would she just have continued on into the Fox river?
Me, too! I’ve never had a problem when calling the grade-crossing number posted by every grade crossing we have. Did they know that it was UP’s track, and not the adjacent Metra/ICE track?
I’m curious about a couple of things: (a) the weather condition at the time of the incursion, and (b) the color of the driver’s hair. (As father to a pair of intelligent blondes, I claim diplomatic immunity for that last one!)
The other tracks are between IL31 (State St) and the Fox River, couple hundred feet away. There is no crossing with those tracks there, since the road the lady was driving on (Wing Rd) comes to an end. I don’t see how they would have the wrong number, since it would be right there on the gates or shed. Even if they called the wrong number, seems odd that they couldn’t get a human being with which to speak.
The weather as I remember it on Friday afternoon wasn’t anything particular. Overcast was all, so she should have been able to see the intersection just fine. Unless, in true Illinois fashion, the weather 15-20 miles down the road was drastically different.
Why is that Nationwide commercial playing in my head where the guy’s GPS tells him “Turn right”, he turns and crashes into a store or something, the GPS says “in XX feet”, and then the announcer comes on “Life comes at you fast”?
It is not necessarily the GPS satelite radio receiver that is “off”. Most of the maps have lots of errors in them. Most of the data was digitized manually from aerial photos and sometimes the person doing the digitizing from the photos can’t tell what is a road and what is not and just “invents” streets by accident. Also, where your GPS map shows you “not on the road” is often because the road does some winding around and the digitization is just straight lines from one point on the photo to another one an inch or two away (on the photo) which could be several thousand feet. Also, the person picking the points sometimes wasn’t very accurate as to how near to the road the digitization pointer is placed and literally misses the road. Throw in parallax errors and the maps can have great errors in them.
The net result is that the routing program software “knows” of streets that do not exist and tells the driver to use them.
I went to visit my sister-in-law in Florida many years ago when one of the rent-a-car companies was offering the in-car mapping software in the Miami area. I had a new GPS mapping program for my laptop PC and had bragged to her about it. It worked well for me, but when I got there my sister-in-law had saved a newspaper article about an elderly couple that had rented a car and used the mapping software direct them to their ultimate destination. It directed them down a boat launch ramp into the Miami River and they had to be rescued from the car when they drove right into it! The man said he thought it was odd to have a “low water” bridge on such a large river. But he figured if it was dangereous to cross there, there would have been a sign saying so! (A low water bridge is a concrete paveing across some 4 or 6-inch clay tiles in a shallow creek in rural areas. They are usually safe to drive across even if some water is flowing over them as the cr
Interestingly, my GPS has a feature called “snap to road”… It’ll put the cursor on the road indicated on the screen. Sometimes it’s more fun to “off road…”
My ex-wife-turned-girlfriend, or something like that, uses a GPS device since she is a home-care nurse. She has said that if she “drives ahead” of the GPS, it may give her instructions to make a turn in the wrong place. (Fortunately, she is savvy enough, that she pretty much knows her way around). Each night she maps out the next day’s route, looking for errors, and mistakes. She has found several while driving. To rely on a GPS is foolish anyway. They are great tools, especially if you are traveling out of state, or in an unfamiliar area. However, after 41+ years here in the Chicago area, I can get around almost anywhere with little difficulty. If I need more information, there is always Google Earth, or MapQuest, to confirm an addresses location.
I have issues using a mapping utility that seems outdated, because of the railroads it shows.
Chicago & Northwestern; Soo Line; Chicago, Central & Pacific; Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; Burlington Northern…
Yet shows Norfolk Southern and CSX…
It seems that west of Chicago, the railroads are in a time warp. Heck, I never knew that the Southern Pacific ran through Springfield,IL and Bloomington, IL right up to the Joliet Arsenal…
I think the moral of this incident is: don’t blindly trust technology.
Yes, “you” can ‘snap to the road’, but the person that digitized the original data from an aerial photo was creating the data you are using and thus there was no ‘snap to the road’ cuz they were creating where you would snap to.
Also, yes, I learned a long time ago to always blame the computer. I used to help some folk from an adjacent department with their computers and one secretary’s job was to enter data into a database. She would call me and complain that some piece of data she had entered was not there. I would go look and find that SHE had made a typo in a part number or date or
lol that was a good read! Truckers do that around my work too and cops hate/love it. They bring them into my work and have the trucks weighed on our scales because 9/10 times there on a street with restricted weight limits and get some real big fines. Not just from the weights and whatever they got pulled over for but the cops go over those rigs with a fine tooth comb and write them up for everything in the book [xx(]
Also there are streets around here on GPS systems that arnt even there anymore or they are but are now dead ends lol somany people get them selfs turned around and lost following that crap. we get alot of lost truck drivers coming in here asking directions because there GPS got them lost and they cant find General Mill’s around the corner lol
I have Delorme GPS on my laptop. Charlotte, NC which is where I live, is growing and changing rapidly but the annual new version seems to keep it very up to date. It works great. Occasionally is is off by a few feet, but not often. It knows which roads are one way. It knows the locations of most restaurants, pharmacies, hotels, and gas stations.
I took it with me on a trip on Amtrak, and it got a lot of attention. Even the crew members kept stopping by to watch it. The conductor even asked me if we were really going 80 MPH as the GPS said.
It was even acurate on the rails. 90% of the time it showed us right on the displayed track. There were a few turns that were not as sharp as they were depicted on the screen.
Only an idiot would respond to a commanded turn without looking out the window.
Always remember: To err is human … to really screw it up takes a computer…