I wonder how this happens, though. Normally, finding a route for cars will try to follow increasingly larger roads. This has practical reasons to avoid scenarios outlined in the article and also performance reasons to avoid searching the complete graph of roads.<p>Getting a route that follows many small roads usually only happens if you tell the GPS to find the shortest route (and really the <i>shortest</i> one), or by using its bicycle or pedestrian routing.<p>It also requires the user to ignore any signs along the way, putting way more trust in a bunch of males that&#x27;s hard to keep updated properly than is healthy. (For topographical maps in Germany (I guess road maps have similar problems) it is sometimes normal for certain regions not to receive an update in a decade or two, thus sometimes showing very outdated features. OSM these days is luckily either very up to date or simply very sparse, depending on the region and how many people with local knowledge are contributing.)