Residents of Ryde are up in arms over the location of Ryde Pier Head rail station according to Google Maps and SatNavs.
"If you look on Google Maps or on your SatNav," said Ryde council woman, Hillary Dale, "you can plainly see the station is in the sea. About five hundred metres out. Or is that feet? No matter."
Local residents fear for visitors to the station, who might end up in the water trying to reach the station. The popular station that runs services from the head of the pier into the centre of Ryde, is in fact not in the sea, but on the pier itself. Local residents want signs putting up, warning about the dangers of attempting to drive off the end of the pier.
Carlos Fernando, the Isle of Wight News website person, who understands technical subjects (and writes a popular column on HTML every week in the paper), explains: "Google and SatNavs operate on a GPS system of latitude and longitude. Occasionally, errors will creep in that places a place up to a hundred metres from it's actual location. Sorry about the misplaced apostrophe. I don't know how that happened, I'm normally so careful in case people realise I'm Spanish. Navigating to the station using Google Maps or a SatNav will take you to the station. You would have to be a moron to drive into the sea when you'd have to pass the station in order to get there."
Hillman Challenger, who runs a car repair and recovery service from his workshop behind the Chocolate Apothecary, agrees with Fernado's assessment. "Aye, all those people I pull out of the Solent each week, moron describes them pretty well I'd say."
