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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it wouldn't hurt for the software to have some warnings and confirmations for trips that exceed 3 hours.

I've been burned by this myself since I still used an old Garmin far past its expiry date - trying to avoid a border toll while I was visiting Buffalo, it tried to send me the complete wrong direction and I only stopped when I noticed the arrival time said 9am and not 9pm... I was unfamiliar with the area so it would be easy to not realize my mistake, I only checked the device when it became obvious when I'd been on the road too long for what was supposed to be a shortish drive.

Similarly, in New Brunswick it tried to have me shortcut through an increasingly-rugged wasteland of logging roads. It took me an hour of backtracking to extricate myself from that. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

I use Google Maps now.

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Every navigation device I've used will show the estimated drive time, distance, and a map. I always do a quick sanity check on these before I start following the directions. Do other people not do this?

On many GPS models, including my own crusty Garmin, this requires an additional tap and a longish wait while it renders the map as an illegible squiggle. So I rarely do this unless I want to confirm that I'm going via a specific route, and even then it's only useful if I know the route options beforehand and can tell them apart.

As an aside, the Garmin routing is terrible: it (for example) frequently "optimizes" for distance by doing endless zigzags on small roads instead of a single turn on big roads, even when the settings tell it to take the "best" or the "fastest" route. Of course this is to some degree unavoidable when all the brains it has is a tiny on-board CPU; but I've already long since resolved that my next car will have Android Auto, so the cloud can do the work.

>As an aside, the Garmin routing is terrible: it (for example) frequently "optimizes" for distance by doing endless zigzags on small roads instead of a single turn on big roads

Google sometimes does this as well. I joke that it seems as if Google Maps sometimes just wants to take a drive in the country. Not that I always mind but, especially if the weather isn't great, I'd probably prefer the simpler route even if it theoretically takes a minute more.

Some say arrival time, not drive time. Arrival time misleading if it's sending you on. A 26-hour journey, and you have to choose to view the full route, often through a tedious UI.

IMHO, this is a place where blaming the user is inappropriate. GPS trips exceeding 3 hours are rare enough that it would be perfectly reasonable for it to make you click through a few extra bits of information in those cases.

I can buy the case for improving the systems, but not blaming the users? These things don't claim to be more than they are: they are driving aids, not brain substitutes. If it's hard to figure out if they're giving you appropriate advice, then you do it anyway, or don't use them.

If manufacturers were making grandiose claims then yeah, blame them. But if anything, the claims are overly conservative because they're afraid of liability.

Google maps isn't free from these problems. This past autumn it routed a lot of people down an impassable sandy desert road that serves a state prison. So many people were thus diverted that there was a line of stuck cars in the middle of nowhere.

I guess a GPS navigator is not an excuse for not having a map or not knowing how to read one, at least on longer out of town trips. I've been burned a number of times when a gps navigator tried to take a 'shorter route' through logging roads and mountain passes that you could cross only on foot.

I trusted Google Maps untill few weeks ago it sent us down a road that became undriveable and dangerous -- costing us about two hrs. Although, this did happen in Martinique, for the most part I've had good experiencea with Google Maps in US.

In the Western US, there are a lot of roads that range between unpaved but well-graded and generally fine for passenger car use to serious high-clearance 4WD in good weather only. In my experience, Google Maps doesn't routinely send you down seriously questionable roads. But, if you drive around those areas, it behooves you to really understand the range of roads out there and be properly cautious rather than blindly depending on GPS--or, for that matter, a map.

The biggest problem is really that a lot of people come from areas where road is 99% equivalent to passable by passenger car under most to all weather conditions and seasons. That's just not the case in many places, e.g. Death Valley.

Rural roads in the United States are something to be especially wary of when using OpenStreetMap derived maps. They are often un-updated TIGER data from 2008, prior to Census doing a big push on accuracy. There are issues with roads being poorly located (or not existing), but there are also issues with little or no differentiation between roads, so a nice new asphalt highway might be classed the same as a barely passable dirt road.

One reasonable strategy would be to stick to things that are labeled as state or US highways.

(with enough scale, it should be possible to use traffic data to figure out which roads should be prioritized, but programs like OSMAnd are not yet doing that)

>with enough scale, it should be possible to use traffic data to figure out which roads should be prioritized

It wouldn't be perfect but, yeah, I'd expect to see some correlation between traffic and road condition--at least for a given area.

There's just a lot of nuance in road condition though. People who take their Jeeps off the beaten track every weekend in national forests and parks have a pretty different set of standards from an urbanite who is renting a car with a doughnut spare and no other special gear.

The goal with OSM is certainly to sensibly classify roads and even to collect information like the surface type and width.

I guess with that part of the comment I was partly wondering if other data providers have done similar things, taking some vaguely useful source data and trying to enhance it using automated methods, leading to the poor navigation talked about in various threads here.

One of my favorite examples of this is using Google Maps to find your way from Monument Valley to Natural Bridges or vice versa -- sends you right up/down the Moki Dugway, which despite being part of a state highway is not a road for everyone.

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