Real question, I’d like to hear takes.
For years I lived in the same place so I knew how to get around. I also got around on bike/foot/transit. I rarely needed a navigation app.
But I recently moved to a new area, and the logistics of the move required me to get a car. With all the new places to learn, I started leaning on google nav more.
But every time it makes a route for me, it seems like it’s fighting against city planners. It will constantly direct me through little 1 way streets through residential neighborhoods if it thinks it can save .1 mile or 30 seconds.
As a concrete example, in my neighborhood the city planners have set up one road as the obvious exit, all the other roads have no lights or restrictions on turns. Navigation never uses that route, and prefers darting across lanes of traffic and turning during times it’s not allowed.
My partner and I joke about how many uturns it suggests. There’s a route I sometimes take where it suggests I make a 270 degree turn off a highway exit across 4 lanes of traffic.
In short, google drives like an asshole. It makes erratic decisions. And it routes people down roads that aren’t meant to carry lots of traffic.
I’m sure there’s some counterargument that this kind of navigation is load balancing and more efficient. But to me, I feel it makes things unpredictable and less pleasant to exist in a neighborhood.
is there any consensus on this stuff?
took me five years of reporting the road into my yard as private before they stopped routing people on it lol
I think it’s the enshittification of cities coinciding with the rise of Google Maps.
But every time it makes a route for me, it seems like it’s fighting against city planners. It will constantly direct me through little 1 way streets through residential neighborhoods if it thinks it can save .1 mile or 30 seconds.
I’m a Houstonian. My city is all big highways that sprout side streets like weeds. So, generally speaking, Google will try to put me on one of them as soon as it can.
But it will occasionally send me down a side street if the highway is gridlocked and the side street is relatively empty.
On a smaller scale - two lanes roads versus tiny side streets - idk if it tries to do the same thing. I’ve seen it send me down some weird side roads in smaller towns, but that’s only typically when the main lanes are clogged.
Idk if that makes things worse per say. If I know an area well enough, I can just tell Google to fuck itself and stick to the main roads.
If nothing else, having a big overhead map is handy. I grew up with the old gas station paper maps, and it was a lot more work to figure out directions. As soon as I could use MapQuest, I was printing everything out in advance.
Yeah, maybe I’m just in a region where the nav algo fails a bunch. My experience is pretty much the opposite.
I’ve seen it send me down some weird side roads in smaller towns
I’ve experienced this. I would say that the threshhold is too low. It will try to reroute me through residential to save 5 minutes on a 3 hour drive.
It’s clear that it’s only focused on the drivers, and not worried about the people in the neighborhoods, who now have highway traffic on their block.
Yeah it’s bad. I don’t use google navigation but when the app gives me a choice of routes I tend to take the longest one because it’s got the least bullshit.
The real wizards choice is to plan your trip beforehand, pull up the list of directions, either use it in the app or save it to a text file. When it comes time to drive, leave off location services and use your cars trip meter to navigate like the old days.
it’s an oft noted thing.
as a personal anecdote, back in may, i was on this road work job to replace a road in a town about an hour north. it was pretty torn up, a little residential street, but the thing is, it was near the local hospital. a regular person would drive along the arterial roads to the big traffic light at hospital drive, and get in that way, but, google maps would try to send lots of people down this little side street to a tiny connector to the back of the home depot, and from there onto hospital drive. i have a strong suspicion that this behavior contributed to how degraded the road surface was. it was not engineered to support that much extra heavy traffic before we got to it.
