This reminds me of how in some ways online maps are far inferior to what the old road maps like the ones Rand McNally printed thirty years ago.
The Google map doesn’t have symbols to distinguish major roads from minor ones. For instance, in the US a printed map would typically have different symbols for free limited-access highway, toll limited-access highway, multilane divided but not limited-access highway, major two-lane road, minor two-lane road, local road, gravel road, and dirt road. Google has none of this; it just has lines of vaguely different width and color intensity.
So in the US I know that if the route has an Interstate highway I know what to expect. Typically a US highway is at least a major route, though you can’t count on it. If it’s a state highway, who knows. The map tells you little about the size or condition of these non-Interstate routes.
So if Google routes me down a non-Interstate route, sometimes I will look at the street view to gauge it. If it shows a big divided highway, I’m good. But sometimes it shows a two-lane road with no shoulders, multiple driveways, and hills blocking the view. Completely unacceptable for driving more than a few miles if there’s absolutely any alternative, yet Google will send you down these roads for two hundred miles if it thinks you’ll save ten minutes—-which you won’t the instant you get stuck behind some slow dump truck.
I don’t know this situation in Russia but years ago on a paper map in the US, that deadly route would have been shown as a minor road on a paper map, in it was on there at all, while the major, safer route would have been shown prominently.
I just marvel at how tech takes us forward in most ways but how the old tech had superior elements that simply don’t get replicated even decades later. (Another example is how old print maps showed rest areas and even distinguished them from simple no-restroom pull-offs. This information is not on Google at all.)
I have no issue with this. The bigger issue I have with Google Maps is that it makes zero effort to avoid dangerous routes. If two routes for a ~45 min drive are within 30 seconds of another, why would I want to risk death by taking the one with an extremely dangerous left turn through oncoming traffic? It makes zero sense.
I'm surprised how bad Google Maps still is at things like this. No I don't want to take the theoretically slightly shorter road through several small neighborhood roads, let me simply follow the main road. Taking intersections into account it's often not even really faster in practice.
Back when I used google maps, I especially hated its insistence on making unprotected left turns. If I knew the area it was taking me to, I would scan ahead for those and try to avoid them, but there were some terrifying times where I pulled up to a busy 5 or 6 lane stroad expected to turn left. I invariably turned right and took an alternate path, for the safety and comfort of everyone (except my map, which would scramble to figure out why I had done something so stupid).
Fun story, driving through Croatia toward Split Google Maps kept telling me the main freeway was closed and to take each and every exit. Someone is maliciously reporting roads closed. Obviously the same could happen to OSM, but there isn't the same 'no way to fix it until Google decides to fix it'.
Similarly when I was in Bangkok wandering around, Google wanted to cross the train tracks at a road that tripled the walking distance to the destination. In reality it was possible to cross the train tracks (i.e an actual crossing, not just anywhere). Worse it was much more dangerous to walk the Google route.
Fixing it on OSM was easy. Fixing it on Google was a pain because it had to be submitted and checked and approved (which it eventually was).
There are definitely places where OSM is far outstripping Google maps. Especially when it comes to non-roads.
1. In the US, driving in a rural area, Google took me down a five-mile stretch of gravel road between two farms. It's questionable whether this was actually a public road, as I got an odd look from a farmer on his tractor. Admittedly, this saved about 30 minutes.
2. In the UK, Google Maps routinely tries to lead me down narrow country lanes to save 1-2 minutes. In many cases, it will take me off an A road (read: main route) onto a single-lane country lane flanked by hedges. It's bad enough that when I'm using Google Maps, I specifically look at the map at each turn it suggests to see if it has an alternate route highlighted that keeps me on the main road, and I choose that route instead.
I don't experience these things as much with Apple Maps, which seems tuned to keep me on main routes.
Google Maps is surprisingly bad at handling dirt roads around my area. It has happily directed me down many awful roads and a couple times through open land without any visible road at all. The estimated travel times can be pretty funny too, like estimating 5 miles down an abysmal dirt road should only take 7 minutes.
I know these sorts of scenarios aren't a priority for them, but I'm surprised they don't even have a roughly accurate estimate given how much location tracking info they collect. If 40 people this year have driven a stretch of road with a range of travel times from 25-40 minutes, an estimate of 7 minutes seems pretty obviously wrong and easy to catch.
At least in NJ, Google Maps typically does a terrible job. When I go from my home to Costco, I take one small road to the highway, take the highway, get off, and take one small road to Costco. It's very fast and easy. Makes a big L on the map, basically.
Google Maps ignores the highway and has me make twenty alternating left and right turns on tiny backroads. It's grueling, a lot of work, and you can't even go fast on them. All because Google Maps is trying to cut the diagonal from one end of the L to the other for a shorter distance. In terms of trip duration, it fails horribly, though.
We were on vacation in a part of the country we are not very familiar with and relied on Google Maps to tell us the way. On the last leg of the trip back home there were two routes, one were significantly faster, so we chose that and ended up driving several miles over a mountain on gravel roads. Luckily it was mostly in good condition. :-)
It was worse when Google Maps tried routing us around traffic by sending us off the highway and down on narrow roads through neighbourhoods and side roads. Poor people living there suddenly had a main road along their homes. This kind of thing should be regulated.
Google Maps is not that great in places they don’t prioritize. They have no ability to handle tolls and direction of roads that are based on day of the week and hour. Local examples from the DC Area: I-66 is marked as a toll road 100% of the time despite only being tolled at rush hour in one direction; Clara Barton parkway is always marked as two way, but it becomes one way during rush hour, I regularly am routed down it by Google maps when it is one way the opposite direction.
I frequently am sent down nonexistent roads in rural Massachusetts, meanwhile there is a paved road in Bristol, NH that Google refuses to route people on; it is used by Apple Maps.
Yes, and this even happens with major highways! I'll be trying to pick a ~200-mile route, and I have to play zooming gymnastics just to see the difference between I-84 and I-95!
Okay, I should just know the difference with roads that big. And okay, generally East/West interstates use even numbers representing what % of the country lies to the South while North/South use odd numbers representing what % lies to the West. But I shouldn't have to know that when I'm wondering how to avoid the accident on "that big yellow stripe that passes through D.C."
Sometimes I'll use a mapping app designed for outdoors activities, because it is so much easier to read than Google Maps.
Same in Netherlands. Google Maps has recently become worse and worse. Small pedestrian roads are missing, and the navigation is getting stupid. Google applies the one-way limitations for cars also on cycling routes.
Or the data is just old. Years ago, the junction between Route 1 and Route 36 in Iceland was very visibly wrong on Google Maps. If you pulled over and looked over the bushes, about a quarter mile south of the intersection, you could see the old Route 36 that was still in Google's road network, with crumbling asphalt and all. And if you looked at satellite imagery, of course there was no trace yet of the newer and more efficient fork.
I have been using Google maps for years to drive from my place to my parents place which takes roughly 7 hours traveling across the midwest of the US. It used to take a rather minimal number of different highways.
Recently though it decided to take me on an extremely annoying new route that has me going through a bunch of tiny seemingly abandoned towns with lots of backroads and even unpaved roads all to save less than 5 minutes.
Now I have to make absolute sure I select the proper route beforehand. But even when I do that it constantly nags me along the way that it has determined there is a faster route so I need to dismiss it. I can't trust it to not take me on some wild back road through a field.
I hear what you're saying, but at least in the US we only have 2 pieces of well labelled and persistent navigational data in the real world: street names and numeric addresses.
In my experience, navigation with Google Maps can be terrible about interchange / exit lanes. It's much easier just to pick the road name and follow the well-labelled and up-to-date highway signs.
I agree with this, which is why the new Google Maps rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like how it changes the emphasis of different streets and roads depending on what you've searched for. A major road is a major road, and shouldn't turn into a minor road just because the restaurant you clicked on isn't on it.
We look at a map of our town or city, and the main roads in and out are the spines - everything is off one of them. If you turn those white, and remove the emphasis, the map becomes far less readable.
In my place (Geneva, Switzerland), Google Maps stubbornly keeps suggesting for years the fastest route form my side of the town to the other through one of few bridges that is actually absolute no-go for public traffic, with tons of warning signs (sometimes some of them are obscured by buses but still hard to miss).
Needless to say, there is often some sucker going through there, and I have to admit I ended up there once too exactly because of Google Maps. No effort to correct it over the years, in one of the wealthiest and most important power/finance centers globally.
What you and parent describe happened to me too, maps are absolute blessing compared to what was there before but they are sometimes not that great ie in cities with a lot of traffic. Its easy to get used to something just working and start demanding perfection, when we are maybe 96% there.
My least favorite thing about Google Maps is when they don’t display the street names in a place that makes sense. Sometimes I just want to look at the route and then drive there without instructions, but have to scroll halfway across the city just to see the name of the street I turn on.
I definitely can second the feeling that Google Maps has gotten "dumber" over time. My city has a major highway that runs over municipal streets and Maps always thinks I've somehow warped from the highway to the street when I drive over it, recalculating and telling me to take a left from the freeway. I'm going 60 and have been on the interstate for the last 20 minutes, how could I suddenly be on the a surface street? I don't understand how I should be comfortable with Google collecting vast amounts of data about my travel habits if it can't even make the experience marginally better with them.
And the Maps webapp still doesn't have a compass. The most popular online map in 2018 can't show you magnetic north, which I guess is because you can't rotate the map at all. That feature was cut in some distant redesign.[0]
The Google map doesn’t have symbols to distinguish major roads from minor ones. For instance, in the US a printed map would typically have different symbols for free limited-access highway, toll limited-access highway, multilane divided but not limited-access highway, major two-lane road, minor two-lane road, local road, gravel road, and dirt road. Google has none of this; it just has lines of vaguely different width and color intensity.
So in the US I know that if the route has an Interstate highway I know what to expect. Typically a US highway is at least a major route, though you can’t count on it. If it’s a state highway, who knows. The map tells you little about the size or condition of these non-Interstate routes.
So if Google routes me down a non-Interstate route, sometimes I will look at the street view to gauge it. If it shows a big divided highway, I’m good. But sometimes it shows a two-lane road with no shoulders, multiple driveways, and hills blocking the view. Completely unacceptable for driving more than a few miles if there’s absolutely any alternative, yet Google will send you down these roads for two hundred miles if it thinks you’ll save ten minutes—-which you won’t the instant you get stuck behind some slow dump truck.
I don’t know this situation in Russia but years ago on a paper map in the US, that deadly route would have been shown as a minor road on a paper map, in it was on there at all, while the major, safer route would have been shown prominently.
I just marvel at how tech takes us forward in most ways but how the old tech had superior elements that simply don’t get replicated even decades later. (Another example is how old print maps showed rest areas and even distinguished them from simple no-restroom pull-offs. This information is not on Google at all.)
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