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I seem to remember someone posting their results of testing Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze for ETA accuracy, and what you describe was also what they found: Apple Maps was the most accurate, Google Maps was optimistic, but accurate, Waze basically reported the best case scenario. Edit: found the original [0]

I've long thought that Waze creates the illusion of saving massive amounts of time, when its benefits are marginal (although real). I know I personally prefer an active commute to one waiting in traffic, even if travel times are identical. Waze seems to maximize for the latter.

[0] - https://arturgrabow.ski/2018/02/19/navigation-apps/amp/

I wonder if those who are more likely to measure something like this are more likely to drive closer to the speed limit? I tend to drive fast and find Google gets me there a couple minutes before ETA, Apple gets me there way before ETA, and Waze just overloads me with more information than I want.

Google Maps also got the person there 5% faster than Apple Maps, in that study.

This really does call for a larger study, though. It would be nice to see how the error bars and potential differences come out across different trip times, and different drivers.

You'd probably end with significantly different results based on country. Somehow the underlying logic of mapping AI seems to be more-or-less of a fit for national road systems — for instance in Europe, with lots of discrepancies between borders, it's really hit or miss: in France and Germany I end up on stupid country roads to save 2 minutes on a 2h drive, but that seldom happens in the Netherlands (granted they have a great road infrastructure). Switzerland is a mess too.

My intuition (listening to AI and DL podcasts) is that they just train too-general US-based (or evaluated or reinforced more specifically) models. Anyhow it's a disappointing situation that e.g. Google maps makes way more mistakes today than it did 5 years ago (but it also does more overall, I guess it's a trade-off, e.g. now it's great for public transportation in large enough cities).

I remember using some car’s built-in GPS once and it wanted me to take every freeway exit and get right back on after. Because it decided that saves time/distance.

Maps really need a “not worth it” features for tiny optimizations. I’d often prefer a slightly slower route that’s less work to drive.

Oh please YES, the "not worth it", followed by an option to "please take me back to previous path before (because) latest fork = mistake". The very idea of judging the overall travel is a good start (at the end, when they prompt you) but individual datapoints should be reportable as well. I'm pretty sure this would massively help build a dataset with "annotated" cases (good / bad) for RNNs.

> I’d often prefer a slightly slower route that’s less work to drive.

Me too, and I suspect most people — like, when is it ever a good option to avoid a free highway to save 1 minute when the driving is twice or more fatiguing? Are we bodyless machines or animals with a concept for "tired" and "attention"? This is where I feel recent evolutions in DL have been, perhaps, more for the benefit of developers and researchers (efficiency), and maybe not for real human benefits on the user side.

I don't claim the problem is easy, but I know second-hand that what users want and what AI projects solve for may be two very different X.

> please take me back to previous path before (because) latest fork = mistake

Seriously. I regularly travel from Ohio to Michigan and back, and often times if I take an exit for gas, Google Maps will assume I want to take an obscure country backroad for the final 2 hours rather than get back on the highway.

I absolutely do not want to worry about deer, a lack of gas stations, food, and light.

This is especially true in the UK where most rural roads are nominally 60 MPH even if they’re barely wide enough for two cars.

> I remember using some car’s built-in GPS once and it wanted me to take every freeway exit and get right back on after. Because it decided that saves time/distance.

It feels like cheating to the other drivers who didn’t take the “short cut” and leads to delays all around due to the extra merging going on. (exhibit A: I-85N vs. I-285 in Atlanta, aka Spaghetti Junction)

I live in Atlanta. I’m curious what do you mean?

My Mom doesn’t even use a cellphone, much less map directions. But she always is amazed at the directions given because she’ll pull out a map and do something with 3 turns what’ll have 20 turns on the map direction.

She’s certainly not wrong that from a UX perspective, simple can be really nice, especially if you’re driving on crowded roads and want to focus on driving.

Another possible option to make navigation more human-friendly would be "keep route simple" - so minimize the number of turns, complex intersections, road works (even without delays), backstreets etc, even at the cost of a few minutes extra travel time or extra distance.

It’s horrible even in the U.S.: the model seems to assume left turns are cheap so I always get these routes which involve 15 minutes sitting at an unprotected turn across heavy traffic. I, and apparently a number of other people I‘ve heard mention it, have largely stopped using it because the times are wildly off - and that’s along the East coast in some very popular areas, not exactly an obscure edge case.

It's just incredible that major map providers don't understand how problematic left turns are.

There's a reason you seldom see UPS and FedEx trucks trying to turn left in crowded urban settings. It's because they cost time and money. Why don't Google and Apple understand that, and give us an option to avoid or discourage left turns?

Or even just avoid turns in general. When I moved to Atlanta in 2014 and was using Google Maps for everything, before I knew my way around, it would often send me on complicated routes that clearly were meant to save a minute or two by doing a "staircase" sort of routing with more turns. Even right turns end up taking time and causing stress because I was always in the wrong lane. (I think they've gotten better with the lane indicators.)

I've been bitten by that multiple times, and had to learn to check a few turns ahead to make sure I'm not about to be asked to make an unprotected left turn across rush-hour traffic in an attempt to save 2 minutes at a light.

I would be interested in trying out a "no left turns" (or at least no unprotected left turns) route preference.

> the model seems to assume left turns are cheap

Happens to me all the time.

It also seems to assume crossing a bridge at rush hour is cheap. My only guess, and this truly is a guess, it is sees people in the bridge lane stopped and the thru lane moving and takes the average.

I have often wondered how the mapping programs handle multiple lanes moving at different speeds. Sometimes my highway exit backs up for a mile, while there are four lanes next to it moving full speed. All of the maps programs show this as blue (no traffic) even though I am moving at ten miles per hour. I’m guessing that they don’t have the ability to distinguish speed by lane.

After using Waze for over a couple of years, I really started getting the impression that I was just a data pawn in a bunch of A/B tests -- like send this one down that route, send that one down the other way & see what happens.

Absolutely sure Google Maps A/B tests routes too.

Even when sitting next to each other in the same car, Google Maps suggests radically different routes to the same destination on my wife’s phone than it does on mine, often with a 15+ min difference in arrival time. It must be testing different routing algorithms as otherwise they should be the same.

Could also be an optimal routing thing too. If google maps sends everyone down the same path it might become too congested. Especially if the route is a detour around construction or and accident or something.

I wouldn't have thought that was necessary, surely. There will be enough Android phones travelling any point in the road network to generate enough data, without Google attempting to generate more data.

I think routing is one of those computationally expensive problems (possibly np-complete) to solve. As a result, there's a bunch of clever non-deterministic approaches that get you "pretty good" answers, but depending on the implementation can produce variable results.

A-to-B routing is simple and not very expensive. You can implement it without very much graph theory knowledge. It's when visiting a number of destinations in an arbitrary order that things get difficult.

A-to-B routing is simple in theory. In practice implementing A* on a graph of all the roads in the world is non-trivial. You'd need to figure out some way to split the data up into chunks or to make neighbourhood lookups fast enough to be workable. I'd imagine you'd end up with something of at least the complexity of hierarchical A, but depending on the size of your chunks you'd need to still special-case the start and end chunks. And that's just the first complexity I can come up with.

I imagine the distance is going to be wildly* nontrivial as well. You'd need to factor in traffic density, weather conditions, road works, predicted traffic density, actual distance as well as traffic speed, not to mention fuzzy human things like scenery. Just going for "shortest euclidian distance" will end up with routing through every alley and side-street if it's even the tiniest amount shorter.

I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a distance metric that looks essentially random unless you're deeply inspecting the graph at the time of routing to see why a certain route is shorter than another.

Of course that doesn't exclude A/B testing, but with google maps they clearly have a routing graph that's updating all the time. It's no surprise that asking for the same route twice can give you different answers. Not to mention they probably include a random factor on purpose so they don't route all the cars through the same street. Of course you'd want the random factor big enough to spread the load, but not so big that random people get shafted by a significantly longer commute.

Seems like an interesting problem to tackle actually, I should look at building an open street map based route planner sometime.

Waze takes more risks, that's for sure. It's still the best one if you know the area you're driving and are willing to ignore the maps.

I still use Google Maps when I'm unfamiliar with the drive for the reasons you mention (ie, it needlessly took me down a busy grid-locked road once).

But otherwise nothing beats Waze for the additional features like construction and police reporting plus it does a good job of finding fast routes far more often than not.

The flipside to me is that Waze will send lots of people down the "time saving" path, which is usually a small road, and kinda defeats the purpose.

I think Waze only really saved time when it wasn't popular. Once everyone takes the same shortcut, you're back where you started.

I got that impression, too. On multiple occasions I ignored a suggested turn because I was pretty certain it would be slower, and as soon as Waze adjusted the route based on my turn, the ETA went down. So it should have sent me the right way to begin with, but wanted to experiment with me to test an alternate route.

After enough of those, I reluctantly stopped using Waze.

Yep, I have the same experience. Sometimes it keeps telling me to do a U turn and turn around on their original route. I need to hit stop and reroute sometimes. Definitely not smart...

I use Waze mostly for the police presence. And there was a lot today (end of month...).

A nice feature would be if it sees more police presence than usual you just get a general warning "there's more police presence on your route than usual".

perhaps it's load balancing for other cars. If one entity controls a significant enough portion of the total traffic in the system they might sometimes make a decision that negatively impacts one packet if it helps a sufficient number of other packets.

I never really got into Waze; once I get to know my way around a city I'm inclined to just get around the oldschool way, sticking to arterial roads and all that.

I also used to work for a company where I occasionally visited an office where Waze was really popular with the folks who worked there. And found that that, when we were meeting up somewhere halfway across town after work, I would typically get there before the Waze users about as often as they got there before me. So, not really much of a time saver. Judging from my experiences on the occasions that someone gave me a ride somewhere, I was probably having a more pleasant, albeit lower-tech, driving experience, too.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd imagine Waze has a law of large numbers problem: The sample size they have for estimating the travel time along any given stretch of side road is smaller, and there's also a lot more ways to route oneself on the side roads, and those two factors compound to mean a relatively high chance that at least one of the routes Waze considers has been assigned a grossly over-optimistic travel time estimate.

I highly doubt the benefits of Waze are real, at least in Miami. While the random routes that Waze recommends might be more entertaining, it rarely is faster and sometimes WAY slower.

Probably a regional thing. I live in Atlanta and overall the routes are good, and Google maps isn't good accounting for traffic.

I grew up in Ft. Lauderdale and when I go back I use Google maps. Waze would take you down roads I'd never use. Also I went to the keys and US1 had an accident. Google maps gave me a parallel road to save me 30 minutes. I thought it was wrong. I turned reluctantly and sure enough, it was a good route... Waze was like derp derp...which was probably to my advantage as everyone else sat in traffic.

Waze also likes to overflow neighborhoods with traffic because it thinks there is a shorter path, which just isn’t a very nice thing to do.

I much prefer driving over sitting in traffic. One thing I noticed with Waze is that it would route me way out in the middle of nowhere to my location vs sitting in traffic. It was kind of interesting to see some of these back roads, I'll admit. I did learn some good alternate routes that I would sometimes just use on my own because I knew the freeway was going to be a parking lot.

I mostly use apple maps now with car play which is fine. After we moved my commute went from ~20-45 minutes to ~12 minutes so Waze really isn't a necessity anymore. :/

I love the idea of switching from Waze, which is increasingly frustrating and wrong.

The problem is that having the speed traps and radar sites on there is just too crucial to give up. I've never found a replacement that does that.

Maybe it's a good opportunity for you to start following speed limits and stop risking everyone's life :)

Driving over the posted limit is not dangerous on most roads.

For any value of "over"? Strapping on a rocket engine and going 900 mph meets the logical definition of "over the limit".

Driving within a reasonable margin above the limit is safe on most roads, under good surface and visibility conditions.

Driving over the posted speed limit can appear safe when it definitely is not.

My morning commute involves a blind left turn out of a residential street. Cars parked on the curb obstruct my view of oncoming traffic in the right lane. This isn't a problem when that traffic observes the 35 mph speed limit. I've had far too many close calls with self-centered jerks driving 55 mph in that lane. Sporty sedans are impossible to see over a row of parked cars.

If you can't see well enough to turn safely, you can't turn. Making a left into a lane of traffic, you do not have right of way. We have a similar visibility problem with parked cars near our driveway and our municipality allows for a certain amount of yellow paint on curbs adjacent to driveways, specifically for visibility. People generally respect it, or at least park further than before the paint. I'd encourage investigating if this is an option where you live.

> Driving over the posted speed limit can appear safe when it definitely is not.

Therefore, the fact that it's left up to the drivers to guess when it is safe and when it isn't means many folks are going to guess wrong and speed when it's unsafe. Would be much better if the signage just actually accurately reflected the safe limits.

When you’re not distracted or tired, have great visibility, and there are no hazards or unexpected behavior by other road users. This is true far less frequently than people believe.

That strongly depends on where you live. If you live anywhere where things other than cars going roughly the speed limit are on or around the road that speeding is definitely dangerous. In Germany that's basically all roads except for the Autobahn and some country roads.

Tempting.

This would be a great idea if speed limits were set by any plausibly reasonable process, but in truth they are set arbitrarily and capriciously.

This would be a great idea if speed limits were set by any plausibly reasonable process, but in truth they are set arbitrarily and capriciously.

Demonstrably untrue. There is an entire very technical industry for this sort of thing. People who take an interest in their communities and go to planning and city council meetings know this. Those who are not involved their communities just complain and blame it on The Man out to get them.

It's extremely variable. You have traffic engineers, sure, but you also have politicians pushing top-down reactive policies to appeal to the limited minority of voters who happen to have the time to go to city council meetings. To say it is "demonstrably untrue" as some universal truth is objectively false.

Yes, lowering the speed limit on a 30 degree declining hill from 100kph to 60kph and having a speed camera at the bottom is "very technical" and not a clear money maker.

You need to break pretty hard to not get fined.

> There is an entire very technical industry for this sort of thing.

The industry being technical does nothing to prevent it's general rules from being dictated by politics. If an engineer does a study that shows no significant increase in injury by increasing the speed limit 10 MPH, I find it highly unlikely the city or state is going to approve it based on those findings.

The speed traps and radar are now showing up in Google Maps in Australia for me it’s great and very accurate. I have no idea who puts the markers there.

Google owns Waze...

(I wonder if the Waze ToS admits to having any crowdsourced data entered by users flow through to GoogleMaps?)

The crowdsourced data seemed combined when I had both waze and Google maps running once.

As for legality, the "content" you submit (which looks to include road condition/event submissions) is sub-licensable and transferable, https://www.waze.com/legal/tos "rights in content".

You as a Google maps user can report various things, its a speech bubble under layers button with a + sign in it, in Android.

Pretty sure it comes from the Waze users; Google owns both.

Google Maps has speed limits, police and other warnings. Been there for at least a few months now. Not sure how accurate they are as I doubt they have as much engagement/reporting as Waze.

Doesn't this info come from Waze?

I'm not sure about the initial data, but I get popups while driving using Google Maps when I pass things asking questions like "is it still there"?

You as a Google maps user can report various things, its a speech bubble under layers button with a + sign in it, in Android. I do now, for any cop cars, debris on road, accidents etc.

This lines up with my experience. About a year and some change ago, it was undeniable to me that Apple Maps had become markedly superior at directions than Google Maps or Waze. GM/W would routinely just be very off and give me the alert to make a turn as I was passing it at speed. Apple has made one howler in the past year or so, directing me to a closed road — recovering from that took about 45 minutes because it was in rush hour at a bad spot — but I looked afterward and I’m pretty sure Google Maps would have given me the same route. Apple Maps’ directions for which lane to be in for an upcoming stoplight or exit are also far more accurate and helpful for me.

I use Apple Maps, but I still think Google Maps is superior at directions only because Google offers more alternate routes and Apple sticks to the usual routes almost all the time. I also think Google is better at updating accidents on highways and ETA calculation.

But Apple Maps has one massive advantage which is the reason I ditched Google Maps and that is the UX. I love how simple it is to read the maps. Important information is shown prominently during navigation and the UI feels super clean. Google Maps, on the other hands, feels really cluttered and slow. It takes a good few seconds just to see the map after you open the app because they are loading all the unnecessary BS like new restaurants, nearby events etc.

I agree with this. I use both Waze and Google maps. I opened Apple maps after a long time a few days back and i was suprised not only with the effcient directions but also the maps and the fact that i can clearly see the name of the road.

Waze also shows me distracting landmarks like McDonalds that stand out on my map, annoyingly. It doesn’t offer me a way to customize what I see or add in restaurants I’m interested in.

Customize it here: https://www.waze.com/business2

I personally use Waze over Google maps for navigation during commute times as it has the advantage of routing with HOV lanes. Does Apple maps support this? (I'm on Android)

Does waze work with detached-HOV/paid lanes? Google maps just gives up when taking the I-75 express lane to/from Atlanta since it's so far from the main interstate.

Waze works fine with them. But it's an option you have to turn off and on, you can't just click a button and route a different way. Sometimes it gets confused as well if you don't take a HOV lane that it wants you to.

Same here. The other night I needed to drive from East Bay to SFO in the rain, and Apple Maps said it was going to take me 43 minutes with an ETA of 7:27PM. I ended up pulling into the parking garage at 7:28PM. Despite the rain and the red bridge traffic, the estimate was almost perfect. In my experience, it's almost always within a few minutes of correct.