An interesting "red but no traffic" phenomenon is in Iceland, with roads which are next to scenery viewing points. The roads are mostly empty in this country, but everyone must've slowed down when they saw the breathtaking scenery, and would pull into the viewing point's parking spot to stop and take pictures. On Google Maps these areas were marked red.
On another navigation related topic; I was using Waze in a high-traffic city, where even the alternate routes have a lot of traffic. I was thinking, it surely would be possible for Waze to look back along my route and calculate which route would have been better for me.
E.g. if I drove from A via B, C, D, E towards Z, and there was an alternate route A-B-F-G-E-Z, and the route branches out at B (you can either take path B-C-D-E or path B-F-G-E), the app could find a car that was near me at point B, and went to F later on. It would then know the time I would have needed to drive from B to F. This ghost car doesn't need to go all the way to E, if it turned off at F, the app could find another car, one which at that point was at point F and later on drove to G (or better, E), and then see how much time they took. And so on for each segment of my alternate route...
So I'm stuck in a traffic jam, and google maps is telling me I can take an alternate route to avoid it and save 25 minutes vs waiting in the traffic jam. Something that occurs to me as I sit in this traffic...
what portion of all the other driver's around me also looking at google maps? Is Google Maps telling them to take the same alternate route as me? Are they all going to do it? If they all do it, does the alternate route (which likely can't handle as much traffic as the original route) just became as jammed as waiting in traffic? Or even worse, if they're all going to do what google maps says, would I in fact be much better off ignoring it and sticking to the original route?
It's hard to tell what's imagination/selection bias, but following google maps traffic-jam-avoidance suggestions has seemed disastrous enough to me enough times that I mostly just stick to the original route now. (Of course, one could also imagine using one's own route knowledge to pick an alternate route of one's own without google maps...)
I suppose google maps could be smart enough to tell half the people to go one way and half the other... I kind of doubt it is, but one could imagine a computerized route direction system which, if enough driver's had it, could actually maximize efficiency by sending different drivers different routes intentionally... I'm not holding my breath for it.
This happens on NY 73, which is a road in the Adirondack High Peaks region between the highway and Lake Placid. It’s legit — even though cars are parked, you still need to slow down!
I usually avoid Google maps for traveling in areas that I don’t know. It takes you off on stupid routes that save marginal time (if any) too much. Waze is good for interstate travel, but IMO Apple is better for giving you the “right”, low drama route.
There is a popular road in a relatively rural part of the SF Bay area for bicycling and on the weekends it appears to have traffic due to the slower speed of the numerous cyclists. There isn't actually more traffic. Google then sends cars on a winding narrow hilly alternate route.
I have a route I take, and let's say I split it up with A-B-C. now Google Maps tells me that AB-BC takes an hour, but AB'-BC' is 15 minutes faster.
It usually turns out that the time delay is on the later leg. So I could take AB or AB', it doesn't matter, and then BC' is the faster choice later on.
I wish Google Maps wouldn't show me AB', because it's misleading. At best it should say AB' is the same ETA. But clicking on it means that some route near the end of my drive is now different, it doesn't actually save me time for my current divergence. It's misleading.
The key assumption there is that your alternate-self ghost-car is following the flow of traffic. Which might be true if the route was a highway; but what if it was, say, a shopping district? (“The other you would have gotten here slower, because they’d have been lured into a Starbucks drive-through on the way.”) Or what if they’re a new driver/have a flat tire, and so are driving slower than the speed limit with cars honking behind them? (“Your other self would have been a teenager who hesitated too long on a left turn at an intersection, and so had to wait an extra light cycle.”)
I used to work for a mapping & navigation company that offered a traffic API service. It worked by using anonymized cell phone data to predict traffic patterns. I once heard a story that during peak hour, every five minutes or so the jams on a highway would magically disappear then reappear. After some head scratching, turns out there is a train track inbetween the lanes of the highway full of high speed commuters that would cancel out the stationary car commuters.
A similar problem happens during unusual big snowfalls in the country or in the mountains. The primary roads turn red because the cars are going really slow cz there is 50cm of snow. So maps redirects you to secondary roads, where there is nobody and even more snow.
Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity. In addition to the "red but no traffic" problems highlighted by others I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes". Additionally:
* I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit.
* There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.
* Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1]
Edit:
[1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
>There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.
Woah, I've never heard anyone else mention this problem. It sounds strange having it said "out loud" because I thought it was just a weird personal quirk/irritation of mine.
I have always wished there was a route option of "easy mode driving," or "no pressure route."
Often the "quickest" route google maps shows me is one that has some sort of difficult turn across multiple lanes going the other direction into a "suicide lane" or what have you.
Either that, of some sort of merging is necessary where you're basically at the mercy of other drivers letting you in (especially tough if you're not an aggressive driver like myself).
Honestly, some maneuvers give me a lot of anxiety, like when I'm on a very busy two lane road (no middle lane) and google is telling me to turn left, so I have to sit there with my blinker on feeling terrible for pissing off all the drivers that are now pilling up behind me, while I anxiously wait for an opening.
Unless Im late for something important, I'd gladly go 5 minutes or more out of my way not to experience that kind of driving pressure/social anxiety. I have a moderate anxiety disorder so I know this might not be normal.
But you're absolutely right! I suppose it does in fact boil down to just having a route option with "no left turns" -- I had never thought of it that way. That's such a simple way to solve 95% of the problem.
----
Edit: a left turn lane, with a green left turn light is totally fine.
Edit 2:
For the handful of caring but misguided people scrutinizing my aversion for left turns:
>Federal data have shown that 53.1 percent of crossing-path crashes involve left turns, but only 5.7 percent involve right turns.
sauce: 2001 - Analysis of Crossing Path Crashes - NHTSA
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
Any decent road routing engine does take into consideration a "turn penalty" and makes left turns more costly then right, among other things. E.g. see the Valhalla docs (Mapbox's routing engine):
> Turn type - whether the turn is a left turn, right turn, or is crossing another road. The cost applied to the turn type also needs to know if driving is done on the left side or right side of the road. While left turns are generally more costly in the US than right turns, the opposite holds in UK.
With routing applications there are many configurable parameters, rather than providing too many options and risking overwhelming the user some of these things are simply baked into the ETA calculation.
In the Google Maps app (both on Android and Android Auto) you can toggle between "Muted", "Alerts only" and "Unmuted". Alerts only is what I almost always use, and it only comes up to warn of congestion (eg "6 minutes of congestion ahead, this is still the fastest route"), accidents, suggested or required detours, etc.
The Google Maps android and web apps also let you switch between transportation modes to compare driving, walking, cycling and public transit. You can even change it to "leave at" or "arrive by" for any time of day for any day of the week, and it'll give you a decent idea of trip time.
I agree with the other suggestions though, it would be handy to minimize (unprotected) left turns, and optimize travel time.
The last one is probably more nuanced than it seems though. For example, I will usually want to go to the grocery store last to minimize the time groceries are sitting in a hot/freezing car, depending on what I'm buying and the weather.
I've found there can also be an inverse of the "red but no traffic" problem where Google Maps is unable to understand that there can be multiple lanes traveling at different speeds on the same street. When I lived in SF I would always run into this at the freeway entrance on 5th and Bryant (shoutout to the worst intersection in the city). The two leftmost lanes going onto the freeway would be backed up for blocks but because the right lanes were open they would average it to a moderate traffic rating and would always want to route me to get onto the freeway via that shitshow.
Like others, I'm glad to see somebody else has noticed the turn issue with navigation. Minimising difficult turns (left/right depending on where you are in the world) across multiple lanes would be fantastic.
Many a time I've need to navigate somewhere fast, so even if I could've found my own way there I'll use Gmaps to find the "quickest" router around traffic, etc. Sometimes it works great, others I find I'm having to make a difficult turn across 4 lanes of traffic on both sides of the road, and I'm stuck there in peak hour for 5 mins waiting for a break. Google only optimised for distance and traffic I was in. (I.e. The traffic on both the roads was fast moving, but entering the fast moving traffic took a long time). Optimising only for the speed of traveling in traffic as opposed to entering it (from a turn) can cause this.
Another pet peeve of mine, is if you're doing a long distance road trip, you sometimes want to see where the next stop could be. That is, you haven't planned it, but your destination is set to somewhere 7 hours away and you'd like to stop within the next hour. There's no easy way to see where a good place could be. I want a "road trip" mode where you can bring up something a bit like those road side signs that tell you the distance to the next 5 towns or whatever. So on your phone you tap an info button, and get distance and time to the next x townships that are on your route or a short detour away.
> I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes".
I've turned off voice navigation altogether. It's just not necessary in most cases. Just take a minute or two before departure to actually read the map and the route, if you are not pressed for time. It also gives you much better spatial awareness of where you are going and how you are going there.
Another feature I want is "money is no object mode" when travelling around new york city. Sometimes it's fastest to take the subway, sometimes it's fastest to take a Lyft/Uber, but sometimes it's fastest to take the subway part of the way, and then take an uber from there. This last situation is really tough to figure out by hand with the existing tools.
I've often thought it would be fun to have a "novel navigate" option, where instead of just picking the fastest route it would try and pick a route that is somehow interesting, or that I haven't been on.
I find it pretty boring to drive the same route over and over, and I'd gladly spend another 15 minutes if it means I get a more interesting route.
> there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area"
Apple Maps (at least in CarPlay) has a "tap for ETA" feature. It collapses the navigation block and only leaves the blue (yellow, red) line on the map and an estimated ETA at the bottom.
I use this daily during my commute where I passively want to know if there's some traffic up ahead, but don't need help to know where I am going.
It's not automatic (e.g. Geo-fence setting), but it is just one tap.
> I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
Google actually already has an api that does exactly this called Google OR-Tools[1]. They could totally build this feature into google map if they want.
> apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity.
Almost all of the “major” popular apps are mediocre, with simple bugs and missing functionality or bad design for years, despite user complaints and requests. Maps, Translate, Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram, Instagram, Discord, Tinder, OKCupid, and even most of Apple’s own stuff. It’s like they fired all but one developer after they became popular.
Honestly i'd love a simplest route option, with minimal turns, especially for areas i dont know well. I'm ok if my driving route takes 5 min longer if I dont have to take a left turn on that 4 lane road, or the weird y intersection, or the very quick left turn followed immediately by the right turn that requires getting across 3 lanes of traffic
On Google maps on mobile, you should be able to touch the volume icon, then pick one of three audio modes, on, off, or one in between where I think it just gives you warnings but not street by street directions (has a speaker with a ! next to it as an icon.
But it only shows up when you are actually routing
IIRC, minimizing left turns was a massive cost-saving measure for UPS (or was it FedEx?) back when consumer-facing GPS systems were becoming commonplace.
> Multi-destination route optimization is not available.
OsmAnd+ on F-Droid[1] has this feature, although the UX isn't stellar. Add intermediate destinations to your itinerary then the Edit next to intermediate destinations > Sort > Door-to-door.
> Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity.
There are some hidden gems out there. I've been using Locus Map Pro (Android app) for all my cycling and geocaching needs for the last few years, and some of the things you mention do have solutions in it. The app is not at all beginner-friendly, there's like a million various options and functions, but if you're willing to spend time configuring it, usually you can have it do whatever you want.
> I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area
When planning a route, it's possible to choose whether to generate navigation instructions, and this can be chosen for any part of the route separately. It's also possible to delete individual nav instructions or manually add new ones.
> I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map
The route can be saved and then shown/hidden on the map, and there's probably no limit on how many routes can be shown. Color and line width is configurable, too. But yeah, it will be quite a manual process, unfortunately.
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
I think that if the navigation engine is switched to BRouter, it's possible to assign different weights to left/right turns. But I have to admit that tweaking these parameters is too much even for me.
At this point it's also worth mentioning that it only uses OSM routing engines (GraphHopper, BRouter, YOURS), so it can't take traffic into account. Which is fine for my needs (cycling), as I'd rather see the Strava heatmap (and I can!) than live traffic data. :-)
(I'm not affiliated with the project but I do use it a lot and have built an add-on against their API, so I'm a huge fanboy.)
Turning left can also be an extremely time-consuming task. Somebody I know drives a 3km longer route on his daily commute but is home about 10 minutes earlier because the shorter (and Google recommended) route contains two left turns that take incredibly long. Optimizing this should really be a goal.
" ... there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes"."
Yes, this is a very obvious feature that one encounters almost immediately when adopting direction tools like this and, like you, I am quite surprised this isn't fixed.
Related: an option, or even a default, to pause media playback for the duration of directions dictation, rather than just drown it out ... if you are listening to news, etc., you can miss 15+ seconds of content while a longer direction is dictated.
Again: these are not hyper-distilled, personal features that took man hours to discover - these are features that one discovers almost immediately, across a broad spectrum of use-cases. Very surprising that it hasn't been "fixed".
Google has recently started to tip its toes in something I've been wanting for so many years: mixing transit and cycling. But it's still mostly useless. For now Google suggests I cycle to the train and then take the train and then change to the subwat, and then walk the rest of the way. But what I want is to take my bike _inside_ the train with me, commute only in transit that allows bikes, and then bike the last mile.
The left turn (or in my case in Australia, right turn) problem is huge and my biggest issue with google maps (and I expect the others are the same but I don’t use any others).
I don’t want to take a backstreet only to pop out at the freeway where I need to turn over 6 lanes with no lights....
I feel it’s getting worse, it’s like google maps is trying to get trickier about where it sends you but the outcome for me seems to be getting worse.
Or, I know there is a faster way, but I want to go via this road.
The number of times I’ve patiently entered multiple points to force a certain route, only to have it ‘optimise’ it for me, on route, without a clear notification, is incredibly frustrating.
It’s not always about the destination, sometimes it’s about the journey. And no, I don’t care that it’s 7 minutes slower!!
Wow, I never actually stopped to think about the way Google determines traffic but it seems so obvious now. This is a very simple but cool trick, I'd expect to see something like this in an action movie where people need to reroute an important car to a particular street.
Anyone have any idea how often this data is updated? So if the guy runs through a street with a cart and it turns red, when will it show up as clear?
Google maps and other navigational apps could potentially flood residential routes that weren't supposed to handle traffic. People have done different measures to combat this. One anecdote is:
"And in 2016, in Takoma Park, Maryland, residents went to great lengths to prevent Waze drivers from flooding their roads during a bridge reconstruction project. A Takoma Park man reportedly started reporting phantom wrecks and traffic jams on his street before Waze banned him" ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-05-0...
This is a hack in an older, juvenile sense of the word, the sense that found cars on top of MIT buildings and football fans holding up cards that spell "we suck" in aggregate.
I might be getting older but "hack" these days seems to just mean "go to work" or even "go to work on the weekend".
This video is a bit of a seminal moment for me. It's made me realise the information and tools we rely on and assume are true are actually just systematic fabrications produced by self-serving corporations, and are not necessarily the truth whatsoever.
This happens a lot when driving around on smaller highways in rural areas here in the US. We even joke when we see red on the map; is it a real slowdown or did the one driver with Google Maps slow down to pass a tractor?
Has anyone tried using Maps? I don't think it solves the left turn problem, but I am extremly unhappy with google maps interface and pushing of ads. After a bit of searching I have found Maps and never turned back. Well, I hope it comes handy to someone else too...
That 10px font size is not accessible. I can't read what's there without zooming in. It looked like decorative text or legal disclosures for a contest or something. Did the site's creator find that the ideal text size to use?
I'm stunned how fast Google Maps detects traffic jams.
I assume all those smartphones are running car navigation and as traffic detection works by trusting the clients I fear there's no chance to avoid this kind of exploit.
Nevertheless it would be interesting to know what's the ratio of correct / malicious clients to fool the system. That migt highly depend on whether Google implemented any detection of faulty clients.
I don't think enough people use Google maps in my area for it to be consistent much of the time.
Lots of random (not on map) or way out of date slowdows. The reporting feature doesn't seem to do much.
Granted otherwise it is a great app, and I don't pretend to have the solutions to the wonkyness, just wonky at times when it comes to identifying traffic issues.
From my last experience circa 1/2 years ago, you just need to be the only one on the road.
About that time I was driving up at odd hours on a highway, when I noticed a yellow stretch on google maps coming up.
Turns out the highway was mostly empty, and the only other vehicle in the road was a truck, which is limited to a fraction of the top speed.
The A14 north of Cambridge has recently been rerouted, and towards the end of the project - but months before it opened - Bing maps showed green traffic across countryside where the construction workers were moving along the new road.
Seems like someone who is malicious could spin up a bunch of VMs, spoof their gps as slow moving across various streets to simulate traffic jams. Even sophisticated spoofing would have hard time detecting this.
You could even do the inverse, simulate no traffic but have virtual cars go through streets faster than usual even if there is a traffic jam!
Would we have some major impacts in the economy of an area if major highways are simulated at high traffic earlier/later than usual over the course of many days?
Could affect local city transportation budgets to build or not build roads/new streets if they base their data solely on analytics coming from Google.
Bots have become more and more sophisticated, so niche types of manipulation is harder to detect, and for something like GPS you can't really prompt a RECAPTCHA before routes are used.
Cell phone tower data probably doesn't suffer from this risk as much, since you have to pay for cellular data and spoofing data to cell towers is probably more difficult.
[+] [-] netsharc|6 years ago|reply
On another navigation related topic; I was using Waze in a high-traffic city, where even the alternate routes have a lot of traffic. I was thinking, it surely would be possible for Waze to look back along my route and calculate which route would have been better for me.
E.g. if I drove from A via B, C, D, E towards Z, and there was an alternate route A-B-F-G-E-Z, and the route branches out at B (you can either take path B-C-D-E or path B-F-G-E), the app could find a car that was near me at point B, and went to F later on. It would then know the time I would have needed to drive from B to F. This ghost car doesn't need to go all the way to E, if it turned off at F, the app could find another car, one which at that point was at point F and later on drove to G (or better, E), and then see how much time they took. And so on for each segment of my alternate route...
[+] [-] jrochkind1|6 years ago|reply
what portion of all the other driver's around me also looking at google maps? Is Google Maps telling them to take the same alternate route as me? Are they all going to do it? If they all do it, does the alternate route (which likely can't handle as much traffic as the original route) just became as jammed as waiting in traffic? Or even worse, if they're all going to do what google maps says, would I in fact be much better off ignoring it and sticking to the original route?
It's hard to tell what's imagination/selection bias, but following google maps traffic-jam-avoidance suggestions has seemed disastrous enough to me enough times that I mostly just stick to the original route now. (Of course, one could also imagine using one's own route knowledge to pick an alternate route of one's own without google maps...)
I suppose google maps could be smart enough to tell half the people to go one way and half the other... I kind of doubt it is, but one could imagine a computerized route direction system which, if enough driver's had it, could actually maximize efficiency by sending different drivers different routes intentionally... I'm not holding my breath for it.
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
I usually avoid Google maps for traveling in areas that I don’t know. It takes you off on stupid routes that save marginal time (if any) too much. Waze is good for interstate travel, but IMO Apple is better for giving you the “right”, low drama route.
[+] [-] s0rce|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bentcorner|6 years ago|reply
I have a route I take, and let's say I split it up with A-B-C. now Google Maps tells me that AB-BC takes an hour, but AB'-BC' is 15 minutes faster.
It usually turns out that the time delay is on the later leg. So I could take AB or AB', it doesn't matter, and then BC' is the faster choice later on.
I wish Google Maps wouldn't show me AB', because it's misleading. At best it should say AB' is the same ETA. But clicking on it means that some route near the end of my drive is now different, it doesn't actually save me time for my current divergence. It's misleading.
[+] [-] derefr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nudgeee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wh1t3n01s3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|6 years ago|reply
* I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit.
* There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.
* Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1]
Edit: [1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
[+] [-] herenorthere|6 years ago|reply
Woah, I've never heard anyone else mention this problem. It sounds strange having it said "out loud" because I thought it was just a weird personal quirk/irritation of mine.
I have always wished there was a route option of "easy mode driving," or "no pressure route."
Often the "quickest" route google maps shows me is one that has some sort of difficult turn across multiple lanes going the other direction into a "suicide lane" or what have you.
Either that, of some sort of merging is necessary where you're basically at the mercy of other drivers letting you in (especially tough if you're not an aggressive driver like myself).
Honestly, some maneuvers give me a lot of anxiety, like when I'm on a very busy two lane road (no middle lane) and google is telling me to turn left, so I have to sit there with my blinker on feeling terrible for pissing off all the drivers that are now pilling up behind me, while I anxiously wait for an opening.
Unless Im late for something important, I'd gladly go 5 minutes or more out of my way not to experience that kind of driving pressure/social anxiety. I have a moderate anxiety disorder so I know this might not be normal.
But you're absolutely right! I suppose it does in fact boil down to just having a route option with "no left turns" -- I had never thought of it that way. That's such a simple way to solve 95% of the problem.
----
Edit: a left turn lane, with a green left turn light is totally fine.
Edit 2: For the handful of caring but misguided people scrutinizing my aversion for left turns:
>Federal data have shown that 53.1 percent of crossing-path crashes involve left turns, but only 5.7 percent involve right turns.
sauce: 2001 - Analysis of Crossing Path Crashes - NHTSA
[+] [-] keyanp|6 years ago|reply
Any decent road routing engine does take into consideration a "turn penalty" and makes left turns more costly then right, among other things. E.g. see the Valhalla docs (Mapbox's routing engine):
> Turn type - whether the turn is a left turn, right turn, or is crossing another road. The cost applied to the turn type also needs to know if driving is done on the left side or right side of the road. While left turns are generally more costly in the US than right turns, the opposite holds in UK.
https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla/blob/716fd6e99ab6f271b6...
OSRM also does this, but slightly differently: https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/wiki/Traffic#tu...
---
With routing applications there are many configurable parameters, rather than providing too many options and risking overwhelming the user some of these things are simply baked into the ETA calculation.
[+] [-] gregmac|6 years ago|reply
The Google Maps android and web apps also let you switch between transportation modes to compare driving, walking, cycling and public transit. You can even change it to "leave at" or "arrive by" for any time of day for any day of the week, and it'll give you a decent idea of trip time.
I agree with the other suggestions though, it would be handy to minimize (unprotected) left turns, and optimize travel time.
The last one is probably more nuanced than it seems though. For example, I will usually want to go to the grocery store last to minimize the time groceries are sitting in a hot/freezing car, depending on what I'm buying and the weather.
[+] [-] agency|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorentis|6 years ago|reply
Many a time I've need to navigate somewhere fast, so even if I could've found my own way there I'll use Gmaps to find the "quickest" router around traffic, etc. Sometimes it works great, others I find I'm having to make a difficult turn across 4 lanes of traffic on both sides of the road, and I'm stuck there in peak hour for 5 mins waiting for a break. Google only optimised for distance and traffic I was in. (I.e. The traffic on both the roads was fast moving, but entering the fast moving traffic took a long time). Optimising only for the speed of traveling in traffic as opposed to entering it (from a turn) can cause this.
Another pet peeve of mine, is if you're doing a long distance road trip, you sometimes want to see where the next stop could be. That is, you haven't planned it, but your destination is set to somewhere 7 hours away and you'd like to stop within the next hour. There's no easy way to see where a good place could be. I want a "road trip" mode where you can bring up something a bit like those road side signs that tell you the distance to the next 5 towns or whatever. So on your phone you tap an info button, and get distance and time to the next x townships that are on your route or a short detour away.
[+] [-] kccqzy|6 years ago|reply
I've turned off voice navigation altogether. It's just not necessary in most cases. Just take a minute or two before departure to actually read the map and the route, if you are not pressed for time. It also gives you much better spatial awareness of where you are going and how you are going there.
[+] [-] dangerlibrary|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fcbrooklyn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delusional|6 years ago|reply
I find it pretty boring to drive the same route over and over, and I'd gladly spend another 15 minutes if it means I get a more interesting route.
[+] [-] dfinninger|6 years ago|reply
Apple Maps (at least in CarPlay) has a "tap for ETA" feature. It collapses the navigation block and only leaves the blue (yellow, red) line on the map and an estimated ETA at the bottom.
I use this daily during my commute where I passively want to know if there's some traffic up ahead, but don't need help to know where I am going.
It's not automatic (e.g. Geo-fence setting), but it is just one tap.
[+] [-] neurostimulant|6 years ago|reply
Google actually already has an api that does exactly this called Google OR-Tools[1]. They could totally build this feature into google map if they want.
[1] https://developers.google.com/optimization/
[+] [-] Razengan|6 years ago|reply
Almost all of the “major” popular apps are mediocre, with simple bugs and missing functionality or bad design for years, despite user complaints and requests. Maps, Translate, Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram, Instagram, Discord, Tinder, OKCupid, and even most of Apple’s own stuff. It’s like they fired all but one developer after they became popular.
[+] [-] bootsbootsboots|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghufran_syed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbea42d4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwrodri|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leppr|6 years ago|reply
OsmAnd+ on F-Droid[1] has this feature, although the UX isn't stellar. Add intermediate destinations to your itinerary then the Edit next to intermediate destinations > Sort > Door-to-door.
[1] https://f-droid.org/app/net.osmand.plus
[+] [-] Liskni_si|6 years ago|reply
There are some hidden gems out there. I've been using Locus Map Pro (Android app) for all my cycling and geocaching needs for the last few years, and some of the things you mention do have solutions in it. The app is not at all beginner-friendly, there's like a million various options and functions, but if you're willing to spend time configuring it, usually you can have it do whatever you want.
> I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area
When planning a route, it's possible to choose whether to generate navigation instructions, and this can be chosen for any part of the route separately. It's also possible to delete individual nav instructions or manually add new ones.
> I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map
The route can be saved and then shown/hidden on the map, and there's probably no limit on how many routes can be shown. Color and line width is configurable, too. But yeah, it will be quite a manual process, unfortunately.
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
I think that if the navigation engine is switched to BRouter, it's possible to assign different weights to left/right turns. But I have to admit that tweaking these parameters is too much even for me.
At this point it's also worth mentioning that it only uses OSM routing engines (GraphHopper, BRouter, YOURS), so it can't take traffic into account. Which is fine for my needs (cycling), as I'd rather see the Strava heatmap (and I can!) than live traffic data. :-)
(I'm not affiliated with the project but I do use it a lot and have built an add-on against their API, so I'm a huge fanboy.)
[+] [-] every|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foepys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|6 years ago|reply
Yes, this is a very obvious feature that one encounters almost immediately when adopting direction tools like this and, like you, I am quite surprised this isn't fixed.
Related: an option, or even a default, to pause media playback for the duration of directions dictation, rather than just drown it out ... if you are listening to news, etc., you can miss 15+ seconds of content while a longer direction is dictated.
Again: these are not hyper-distilled, personal features that took man hours to discover - these are features that one discovers almost immediately, across a broad spectrum of use-cases. Very surprising that it hasn't been "fixed".
[+] [-] toper-centage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssss11|6 years ago|reply
I don’t want to take a backstreet only to pop out at the freeway where I need to turn over 6 lanes with no lights....
I feel it’s getting worse, it’s like google maps is trying to get trickier about where it sends you but the outcome for me seems to be getting worse.
[+] [-] 0xffff2|6 years ago|reply
Waze has precisely this option.
[+] [-] RileyJames|6 years ago|reply
The number of times I’ve patiently entered multiple points to force a certain route, only to have it ‘optimise’ it for me, on route, without a clear notification, is incredibly frustrating.
It’s not always about the destination, sometimes it’s about the journey. And no, I don’t care that it’s 7 minutes slower!!
[+] [-] WilTimSon|6 years ago|reply
Anyone have any idea how often this data is updated? So if the guy runs through a street with a cart and it turns red, when will it show up as clear?
[+] [-] maxtollenaar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateburke|6 years ago|reply
I might be getting older but "hack" these days seems to just mean "go to work" or even "go to work on the weekend".
[+] [-] mindfulhack|6 years ago|reply
What does this mean for Google Search?
(We had this discussion the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22139421)
[+] [-] sunflowerfly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpindar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stiray|6 years ago|reply
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/
[+] [-] rosybox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flarg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philshem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unfundiert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
I don't think enough people use Google maps in my area for it to be consistent much of the time.
Lots of random (not on map) or way out of date slowdows. The reporting feature doesn't seem to do much.
Granted otherwise it is a great app, and I don't pretend to have the solutions to the wonkyness, just wonky at times when it comes to identifying traffic issues.
[+] [-] joantune|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timthorn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateburke|6 years ago|reply
In a suburb, surely 20 phones would be enough, no? At $30/ month maybe somewhere between 500 and 600 per month?
[+] [-] k2xl|6 years ago|reply
You could even do the inverse, simulate no traffic but have virtual cars go through streets faster than usual even if there is a traffic jam!
Would we have some major impacts in the economy of an area if major highways are simulated at high traffic earlier/later than usual over the course of many days?
Could affect local city transportation budgets to build or not build roads/new streets if they base their data solely on analytics coming from Google.
Bots have become more and more sophisticated, so niche types of manipulation is harder to detect, and for something like GPS you can't really prompt a RECAPTCHA before routes are used.
Cell phone tower data probably doesn't suffer from this risk as much, since you have to pay for cellular data and spoofing data to cell towers is probably more difficult.