That was pretty much my experience with Google Maps when I was in Italy with a friend. She’d switched it on on her phone to find our way back to the car park. We ended up walking round for hours – well, I was in a battery-powered wheelchair, so naturally we just kept going round in circles. Believe me, just asking for directions is much quicker.

These turnstiles lead to the station; many stations in big cities have them, but smaller stations don’t. This means you can only enter the station with a special pass in your name, which you also use to pay for your train ticket, or you have to pay using your phone.
One downside is that, even if you’ve got plenty of time to spare, you can’t go to the shops inside the station, because once you go through the gate, you’ve already paid for a train journey – even if you don’t board until a few hours later.
If you’re familiar with the station and there are terminals on the platforms for checking in and out, you can first go to a platform, check out there, go shopping, and then, of course, check in again before you actually board the train.
I do doubt whether it really helps to prevent fare evasion, though, as I’ve seen plenty of times when a gate for a wheelchair is open and people simply walk straight through. There are also quite a few people caught on the train travelling without a valid ticket, who are then either removed or given a fine.
I suspect these gates are also there to keep homeless people out, but of course they can climb over them too…