Incident 155: Google Maps Allegedly Directed Sierra Nevada Travelers to Dangerous Roads amid Winter Storm

Description: Lake Tahoe travelers were allegedly guided by Google Maps into hazardous shortcuts in the mountains during a snowstorm.

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
155
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2021-12-27
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Google Maps may have led Tahoe travelers astray in snowstorm
sfgate.com · 2021

It appears that Google Maps may have guided weary Lake Tahoe travelers to closed-off and even dangerous roads amid record-setting snowfall.

Social media posts, including from Crystal Kolden, a professor of forest sciences at UC Merced, have…

Snow Closed the Highways. GPS Mapped a Harrowing Detour in the Sierra Nevada.
nytimes.com · 2021

The road once carried stagecoaches during the Gold Rush, twisting its way through what is now a national forest and an area of the Sierra Nevada known for snowmobiling.

In the winter, the rugged passage, known as the Quincy-La Porte Road or…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.