Google Maps removes route recommendation after driver freezes to death

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.)

> same thing happened here in Canada a couple of years ago. A nurse was sent to work up north by an agency. The guy followed google map , ended up being stock on a road that was only used during summer by locals, he froze to death. Something similar happened to me in Australia in the bush in NSW, google told me there was a gas station where there was non. Had to sleep in my car and ask locals where I could buy gas the next morning. On Vancouver Island it was sending me on private woodcutting trail. Google map can be very dangerous especially for young urban people who think they hold the world in their pocket as long as they have battery.