"How much to route traffic off the interstate past my business?"
on a serious note - the Telsa in-car mapping app uses google map tiles, and they are choosng what businesses show up with icons when you look at the map.
Google maps algo is terrible. Especially when it comes to toll roads and interstate highways in the US.
For example, there is a section of i95 that is single lane for a few miles due to construction. DoT has signs up saying avoid 95 and take i495 (it's a bypass interstate highway for 95). Guess where Google tells you to go? Waze is a little better because it actually defaults to i495.
I've also noticed that Google will try to put you on toll roads more often than not.
Ho hum. The free TeleNav app built in to Sprint cell phones has done optimal traffic routing automatically for years. And the TeleNav speech synthesis is far superior, at least on my Samsung Epic. I really have trouble understanding what the Google Maps app is saying during turn-by-turn directions.
> Once I’m on the freeway I no longer need the navigation, but I still want the en route traffic info and ETA.
Apple Maps on CarPlay added this feature and I love it. It works great for routes where I pretty much know the way but want a heads up for traffic and such.
My issue isn't so much the pain of entry — although it is a pain — as the fact that Google Maps provides better directions, taking into account current traffic conditions, than my car's system.
OTOH, my car's system knows about highway amenities like food & gas, and has a neat feature where it displays a preview of what certain turns look like.
You don’t like paying $300 for a map update? On my car, Nav + traffic was $3k. CarPlay was $300 and I get multiple map choices like Waze or Google maps. Only infotainment that comes close is Tesla yet map data is always out of date with construction road closures.
How do people actually use the traffic layer on Google Maps? It’s not obvious how a red highway compares to a green side street. And how stale are the data? My friends just ignore the traffic layer and use Caltrans’ website directly because the source is known and presumably the information delays are more deterministic.
How many Android phone owners walking down the street does it take before that street is marked red?
Google has been putting a lot of focus on expanding traffic coverage, but it’s not as useful without any transparency about its source and quality.
And last month Google Maps tried to convince me about 12 times to get off the highway and take back roads on a 900mi one-way trip because of hallucinated traffic.
I was in LA last week (vacation + rental car) and Google Maps definitely sent me to the express lanes on the I95 every time. They had the exact knowledge of the entrances and merges back.
As an aside, yesterday I was traveling upstate NY and to get off from I87 to some local road, Google Maps navigated me to a "Tandem Area", which was also marked that way by a sign and was indeed the right choice. Of course, I'd never turn myself from a highway to a Tandem Area ;)
So it seems like they have a lot of small detail knowledge.
Agree. I prefer major interstates for road tripping — something Siri & Gigi (the name we came up with for Google Maps persona) don't always seem to get right.
So in our road-tripping van, we keep a trucker's road atlas for the U.S.
Mapbox traffic and routing is pretty far from ideal. Used it for driving directions for awhile because of the relative cost and ended up constantly wishing we could just use Google. I don't recall specific issues though.
My maps app on my phone gets much more frequent updates than the maps fucntion in my car. Saying that I do use my in car nav system, I just rely on googlemaps for traffic data and redirections,
Much, much more than traffic, though that is useful. The anonymized probe data is used to refine business driveways inferred from satellite imagery, for example. That’s why suddenly Maps can often route you to the correct parking lot instead of a nearby curb. Think about it: if you know a phone is navigating to Safeway, where the user stops navigation is potentially interesting in aggregate and divulges almost nothing except the average parking preference of an iOS user.
When I returned home from a long trip with the family, Google Location History was invaluable in helping me find which tolls I had to pay. Seeing where I'd travelled, I could see which of a couple of toll roads I'd taken off I-5.
on a serious note - the Telsa in-car mapping app uses google map tiles, and they are choosng what businesses show up with icons when you look at the map.
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