Driver finds GPS unit doesn't know it all

As John Melling drove the Interstate 540 Outer Loop around northeast Raleigh last week to visit a client on Falls of Neuse Road, he got into an argument with the $480 gizmo that sits on his dashboard and tells him where to go.

"It kept yelling at me to turn around," said Melling, 52, a New Bern insurance agent. "It wanted me to get back on the Beltline."

Raleigh's 440 Beltline was the old, slow way to go from eastern to northern Wake County.

The new, quick way is a nine-mile arc of I-540. It opened last January. But Melling's Garmin Nuvi GPS navigator does not know it exists.

Even after Melling paid Garmin $70 for an official 2008 update of its map database, his know-it-all Nuvi draws a blank on several four-lane and six-lane North Carolina freeways that carry thousands of cars and trucks every day. Some of them have been open since 2006.

How can this new technology be so smart -- and so dumb? You can find similar lapses at online mapping sites that get their databases from the same sources.

Melling really likes his GPS navigator. He drives about 25,000 miles a year. It is his constant companion.

He tells one client goodbye and punches in the next address. The gadget guides him to his next stop, with text on an animated map screen and with a simulated woman's voice that tells him when to turn.

It helps him find gas when he's running low, and it knows where to buy brand-name coffee.

That's cool. But in the Triangle and across Eastern North Carolina, Melling's GPS navigator doesn't know a bypass from a hole in the ground.

The U.S. 17 Jacksonville Bypass -- a fast, four-lane freeway -- opened in December 2006. But the Nuvi tells Melling to drive the old way through town, stopping at all the red lights.

The Nuvi map does not show the U.S. 117 freeway from Goldsboro to Wilson (recently renamed Interstate 795) that opened in August 2006, or a long stretch of the U.S. 17 Wilmington bypass open since June 2006.

The gadget also is blind to five miles of the I-540 Outer Loop -- six lanes wide in western Wake -- that Triangle commuters began driving in July. But it is no less adamant when it tells Melling he has made a mistake and must make a U-turn "now."

"You can look at the freeway and see it," Melling told the Road Worrier. "But the computer essentially says, 'Ignore what you see because I'm the computer, and I know it's not there.'"

Ditto for the online sites. Yahoo and Traffic.com maps are still missing both ends of the I-540 Outer Loop. Yahoo knows zero about U.S. 117/ I-795 near Goldsboro. Yahoo, Mapquest and Google overlook the Jacksonville bypass, too.

These sites buy their GPS maps from Chicago-based Navteq Corp., as do several automakers and GPS device manufacturers -- including Garmin.

"Navteq has a very large fleet of vehicles and individuals who literally go out and drive every road in the United States," Garmin spokeswoman Jessica Myers said. "They aggregate all that information and provide it to us."

Garmin customers generally see a six-month lag in their mapping information, Myers said. Although Navteq keeps tabs on construction timetables for major new highways, she could not explain the North Carolina freeways that had been overlooked for a year or more.

"That 2008 update is the most recent and reliable information we have," Myers said. She referred the Road Worrier to a Navteq spokeswoman, who could not be reached for comment.

Melling is steamed about the obsolete travel information, and Garmin's refusal to refund his $70. But he and his Nuvi are still on speaking terms.

"I really love my product. I just despise the fact that I just spent $70 on a worthless update, and I can't do anything about it."

Go to the source

The best map you can get is free: the NCDOT State Transportation Map. Most of the Nuvi's missing freeways were clearly marked on NCDOT's 2007 map -- and on the 2008 edition issued last week.

But the official version is fallible, too. The NCDOT map incorrectly shows Jacksonville's Bypass as unfinished.

Call (877) 368-4968 or go to ncdot.org to get a copy.