jducoeur | Google Maps is, often, on crack

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[First of several little posts about Coronation and reflections on the reign.]

The travel to Coronation was generally fun and stress-free, at least insofar as Friday rush-hour driving ever is. But it was a good reminder that Google Maps is an automated program, and sometimes shows poor judgement. To wit: regardless of the traffic on the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike, taking us through the middle of downtown Newark is probably *never* the right answer. This will remind me to look at the route it has laid out, and see what that actually *means*, before uncritically following it.

(On Sunday, we did the more sensible thing:

msmemory figured out the route herself, and we just used Google to keep an eye on the traffic...)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dsrtao

GMapsNav seems to want to optimize for shortest distance, and does not take into account traffic, number of turns, or speed of roads. Having a "Recalculate for shortest time" option would be a Good Thing.

From:

jducoeur

It's actually not even just shortest distance -- it's some combination of that plus having information about traffic. I had one comical trip from Arlington to MIT, where Google *knew* that Mass Ave was one long traffic jam but damned well wanted me to take that anyway. I took the shorter (and less trafficked) back roads instead, with GMaps screaming at me the entire time to turn onto Mass Ave, despite the fact that, every time I ignored it, its own estimate of the time to destination got shorter. Far as I can tell, this was because it didn't *know* the traffic on the back roads, and was therefore unwilling to route me on them.

I love GMaps in many ways, especially for the real-time (and predictive) traffic info. But they need a lot of work on the routing algorithms -- they're still not as good as my little Garmin...

From:

laurion

Indeed, whereas my Garmin seems to optimize for shortest time. Of course, it doesn't know about traffic, so I can still run into trouble at times, but it does have a really easy and useful 'detour' button which will sometimes get me around a trouble spot.

From:

jducoeur

Actually, my Garmin *does* have traffic info -- but it's dependent on over-the-air reports, so they're not as accurate as the Google info. But when it does know about a jam, it's remarkably good at routing around it: I've learned a number of key shortcuts through Cambridge that way...

From:

laurion

Some models do have that. My father has one of those. IIRC they're relying on traffic reports from MSN, but they do seem to be less real time than the Google ones. One wonders where each of those sources is ultimately pulling data from.