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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

This is why I desperately want a routing mode for 'easiest' drive. Surface streets only, no left turns onto busy highways just to save a minute, no weird shortcuts through neighborhoods, keep me on the highway. I've had so many times where google has had me drive through sketch areas of LA which ended up taking more time dealing with cross traffic. All they have to do is give up on quickest route.

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Even roads that should be real are in different state of maintenance, there's some very bad roads here in central Italy, the likes that will tear a wheel apart from your car but due registration show white or even yellow on Google maps.

I do most of my intercity navigation trough state and road signage, with the navigator on but only for the last stretch, like driving me to the address once we're close.

Around here, "navigator shortcut" had already become a derogatory term for their inane suggestions.

There's some that provide a truck mode, but I don't know what weights they have on their algos.

Via Michelin used to have a main roads mode, but they didn't give turn by turn back then only planning.

In the Netherlands we have signs like the one below. Telling you to stay on the highway and turn off your GPS. Because Google Maps and other software makes you take all these weird short-cuts. Putting trucks through small towns etc.. I think they also have them in Belgium.

(https://images.trafficsupply.nl/imgfill/800/800/i-114795-69c...

To be honest, unless you know why the sign says this, it's not completely clear. Is it warning that your GPS will turn off? Is there EM interference around the area? Should I follow the road unless I've got GPS active?

I suspect it would take me a moment to process this into some action.

Yt doesn't help that there's a substantial number of "the best way to X is Y" (language varies) type signs that are not there because it's the best way, but because a semi truck once got stuck or because there's a turn involved that's terrible at rush hour or some other reason that boils down to the "wrong" way being the better option except for some edge cases.

A lot of people confuse "GPS" with "moving map software". I had a neighbor once say "My work's address is wrong on the GPS". There is likely nothing wrong with the GPS signal. It's just that the map data in the area may be known to be incorrect.

I agree 100% and this is a more serious issue in other countries. I've seen Google Maps lead you down some extremely dangerous areas just to save like 5 minutes.

Yeah, there's a reason roads in that area are so open.

It’s another example of unintentional bias at play. Most “Googlers” living in safe, well-maintained suburban USA assuming the rest of the world is the same.

Anybody living on the Bay Area is painfully well aware that there are seriously sketchy neighborhoods. It's probably more an issue of data: there are no street-by-street crime maps for most of the world, and neither can Google feasibly collect this on their own.

They absolutely could make a "safe zone" map overlay, but the political consequences would be PR suicide.

While I agree with the sentiment, that's a complex problem to solve, what streets are "dangerous" and what aren't. Especially at scale.

I've taken to just planning my route myself. Common sense and a good map rules when it comes to navigation. At the very least you should check the route that has been calculated before starting.

This. If you use Google Maps with biking it is even worse, with really inefficient turns and shortcuts

Use OSM and BRouter. OSMAnd works with it, but it's not trivial to set up after the UI changes from some months ago.

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