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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Journey time calculations in Google maps, Uber etc. mean no one I know is ever on time.

If you need to be somewhere at 8:30 and the journey “takes 17 minutes”, one psychologically sets 8:13 as the deadline for leaving the house. You pick up your keys at 8:13, actually leave a few minutes later, hit traffic or take a wrong turn or two, and end up crossing the threshold at your destination fifteen minutes late.

It’s no big deal and quite a grumpy old man thing to say, and I also don’t know if tech is the root cause, but squeezing travel into unrealistically small and algorithmically created windows of time has killed most people’s sense of punctuality, including mine if I’m not careful.

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Yeah I wish there was a "door-to-door" buffer that was enabled by default. I don't think a lot of people are ever taught the concept of backwards planning.

I'd guess it isn't because of specific services like Google, but the fact that you can now say "I'll be 5 mins late" while you're on the way. People used to not be contactable until the appointed time, now it feels like you're already there with them.

And this gets us back to the classic xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/612/

Google's estimation for my country is always less than what is achievable if you stick to the speed limit. I guess they calculate it based on other drivers.

I recently rushed to catch public transport earlier than the one in the Google Maps trip and now all trips estimate my walking time as running time.

In practical terms speeding actually makes very little difference to your journey time.

Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip.

The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much more than 10 minutes.

I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.

There are exceptions to this though. If you're driving through Europe at night you can easily spend most of your trip on highways safely going 180kmh or faster, saving you many hours on longer trips.

180kmh at night is definitely not safe on a highway. Even with perfect visibility during daytime, anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe.

How come? The roads themselves certainly aren't the limiting factor, often you could go even faster.

> anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe

Anything above 150-160kmh is certainly pushing it for most cars, the highways themselves tend to be fine for even faster speeds. There's a vast difference between speeding in a WV Polo and a BMW 7series, it's downright terrifying to go 160 in the Polo but the BMW won't start shaking like that even at 260.

I drive between Barcelona and Berlin pretty regularly, sometimes I go all the way to Bucharest. There are definitely stretches of road on those routes where you can't go fast in low traffic conditions, but they're in the minority.

You will most likely be partially liable for any accidents over 130kph because it is difficult for people to judge speeds over that amount.

This is why if you spend much time over that line, you will find that people will seemingly jump out from behind an LKW and cut you off. It's not because they're idiots or trying to intentionally crash, but rather they most likely completely misjudged your speed due to the innate human capacity for judging speed.

Therefore I've been told that while it's not against the StVO to drive over 130, doing so is a liability risk.

Just because you're driving fast doesn't mean you have to be driving dangerously, but of course there's going to be a significant correlation as idiots also like to drive fast.

I have no problem slowing down from 200 to 130 whenever I approach an entry ramp or pass a big truck, and I certainly aggressively avoid situations where I'd have to do so frequently.

Also, while going over 130 might strictly be a liability risk it does not mean that you're going to automatically be liable. See this case of a guy going 150, he didn't do anything wrong and wasn't held liable https://www.verkehrsrundschau.de/nachrichten/urteil-schnelle...

By Europe you are meaning Germany only, I believe, in most other European countries there is a speed limit of 130 km/h or 140 km/h, day or night doesn't matter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_by_country

To be precise it's 120 km/h in most, 130 km/h in some. At least in western/northern Europe (except Germany of course, with it's Authoban)

Yep, but it doesn't change the "base" point, which is, you cannot legally drive faster than 120/130/140 kmh (depending on the country) and certainly NOT 180 kmh in any European country BUT in Germany (and only on some - many - strerches of the Autobahn, in some other there is anyway a speed limit of 120/130/140 kmh):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Germany

http://www.autobahnatlas-online.de/Limitkarte.pdf

http://www.autobahnatlas-online.de/LegendeLimit.pdf

Oh, I just ignore the speed limits when there's no traffic. With Waze and laserlicht I've never got a speeding ticket.

If you're driving through France or Spain after 1 AM you'll see see that everyone else tends to be speeding too.

100 / 70 - 100 / 85 = .25 = 15 minutes.

10 minutes a day on a commute to work and back is significant and, if you drop down a couple mph, is low risk. That’s almost an extra hour a week without giving up any valuable activity.

I could only see the cost/benefit looking not worthwhile if you already have a lot of free time. An adult commuting 90 minutes a day might only have 2-4 hours of free time per day during the workweek.

There is an increased risk of an accident with reduced reaction time and any accident may be worse with more velocity/energy at play.

Ask a paramedic whose worked in a big, commuter city about their experience.

Yes, this should also be considered although the rarity of a crash where the consequences will take longer to deal with means it isn’t meaningfully part of the time benefit calculation. Sorry to speak morbidly.

The effect also depends on the natural speed at which traffic flows and how the extra time is spent, as fatigue also increases crash risk.

For Austria at least, their car travel estimates are eerily accurate in my experience, including accounting for normal levels of traffic for that time of day/week. Traffic jams mess with it to some extent of course, as they appear and disperse relatively suddenly. And no, I don’t speed.

Their bike estimates are consistently wildly optimistic however. If it’s an easy route and I pedal flat out with no traffic and without hitting any red lights, I can get close to the estimated time.

OK, I don’t have a road racing bike or e-bike, and there are people who are more athletic than I am, but I’d say I’m fitter than the median. Their model seems to assume around 25km/h average speed, which isn’t really sustainable (Or safe) in everyday cycling with other road users about.

It does. Speed limit in my hometown is 30km/h but google always estimates it based on 60km/h that people actually go at.

Google also bikes a bicycle exceedingly fast in cities. Sometimes you have to double the estimate for it to be realistic.

The plus side is that I can kill time on my phone while I wait for late people to arrive.

Google should calibrate it by how long it takes to leave your house :)

Or cross reference calendar events with directions lookups and actual arrival times, and if you’re consistently late then overestimate the time.

My Uber estimates usually end up being half as long as the trip actually takes in NYC anyway.

Additionally those time estimates aren't always accurate. I used to do deliveries all over my county using gmaps, and it was usually 5 minutes off, even as much as 10 minutes off for some of the further destinations.

That's interesting, as for me it's eerily accurate and consistently gets it right within a minute or two for short journeys and within 5 to 10 mins for longer journeys (3± hrs). I guess it could be pretty location specific?

I always have to buffer it, but I never quite know how much to buffer. Usually I add 5-10 minutes to the number. Or round it up.

I feel exactly the opposite. Google's estimates are usually accurate down to a couple of minutes for me.

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