Is your GPS wrong driving around Rhode Island? Here's why

Do you know all that goes into your GPS to get you from point A to point B?

I didn’t until I had a chat with Charles St. Martin. He’s the chief of public affairs for the Office of Communications and Constituent Services at the R.I. Department of Transportation.

What does GPS, the Global Positioning System, have to do my job as dining editor? I have to get to restaurants don’t I?

After my nearly 35 years working here in Rhode Island, I’m pretty sure I’ve been on every route in every corner of the state. Though I'm not blessed with an innate sense of direction that some people have, I do just fine, most of the time.

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But there have been days I’ve driven in Warwick that I find myself not where I planned.

It happened again when I headed to and from the new Plant City X recently. I knew where I was going. But those Apponaug roundabouts turn me around. And not in a good way.

I think I get overly anxious when I approach them because of my first trip to Vanda Cucina back in 2018. I’m pretty sure I went round and round the roundabouts three times before I spied the restaurant back then. And I had my husband with me who has a good sense of direction but was led astray by GPS, too.

This all vexes me enough that I put in a call to St. Martin hoping he’d explain why my car’s GPS seems to mislead me in Warwick. He had a lot of insight that made me realize Warwick wasn't my problem.

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Did you know that when the state reconstructs existing roads, changes exits or ramps or adds roundabouts, they feed that information to Google, Waze and all the popular mapping companies?

“We provide that info as quickly as possible,” he said.

Still, it can take some time for each of those companies to post their updates so they are picked up by your GPS system.

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“What we find is the live map on Apple or Google or Waze updates faster than a Garmin or something built into a car,” St. Martin continued.

If you have an older car, maybe that explains why directions are often different than the ones on your phone.

St. Martin also told me that if a city or town re-aligns streets that aren’t state roads, it’s their responsibility to report the changes. Maybe they are quick to do that, maybe they aren’t.

The DOT noted those Warwick roundabouts back when they were new years ago. More recently, they reported the Reservoir Avenue exit change on Route 10 in Cranston and the reconfigured single exit off I-95 to Route 138 from what were two interchanges in Richmond.

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With all this new information, I’m ready to navigate any road to find my destination. But I will continue to do research first, especially if I’m in an unfamiliar area. The trust in my auto now has some healthy skepticism.

As St. Martin said, “GPS is good, but you still need to know where you are going.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI DOT reports changes like Warwick roundabouts to GPS providers