Redefining what a map can be with new information and AI

But yeah, I have been sent on 'roads' that are just a little more than overgrown goat tracks, or across private land.

TBH I would try a lot of these roads even if I didn't use google.

> Not so much when you have no choice but to travel for work and you have to spend several hundred dollars a month to do so.

People always have choices on the margin.

In any case, I am not arguing for a higher total tax burden. Eg I'd be very happy for the CO2 tax to be distributed equally to all voters. Or for petrol taxes to substitute for other government revenue.

Eg in my adopted home of Singapore there's a cap of about one million cars on the road total in the whole country. To operate a car, you need a Certificate of Entitlement (CoE). Each CoE is valid for ten years. Each month approximately 1% of CoE run out and are thus re-issued via an auction.

We also have pretty high pretrol taxes.

But overall government revenue is only about 15% of GDP.

Why can’t a third party routing software assess safety? It’s not a realistic expectation to expect all roads to be equivalent in safety.

Even if you agree with that, it's still not the governments responsibility to make all possible routes exactly equally safe. (That's actually not possible, for any non-zero level of risk.)

So even if the overall risk was low and in some sense reasonable, you might still want to pick the less risky route.

Also keep in mind that different people have different risk appetites.

I guess maybe I'd like a little bit of say in how the software I use gets updated. I don't know how that would be implemented, but this got me thinking that maybe there is a way that this software thing could be move a little closer towards a partnership than the autocratic "hey we're going to arbitrarily change this piece of software you use frequently". (You can see similar thoughts with people complaining how Big Sur uses more space, or the complaints when GMail changed things to be less dense.)

A tax will always be passed on to the consumer, even if the govt taxes Ford, it will just make the car more expensive.

Using game theory, a question could be "how do we get Ford to make more electric cars, improve efficiency of electric car production, and incentivize them to advertise electric cars?"

My take is that businesses drive change, not consumers. On the whole, consumers are told what they want.

The second part of your comment, seems to assume only one kind of action is possible. Others might say, great let's do both.

The faster you go, the more your fuel efficiency decreases. For the most part this is due to wind resistance, because there is a velocity^2 argument there(ie if you double your velocity, you quadruple your wind resistance). Your engine is also designed to operate more efficiently at certain speeds but that is less directly quantifiable than wind resistance.

So you might be able to get 40MPG while doing a steady 40 mph, but only get 20MPG when doing 80mph.

So if you need to go 40 miles, if you can do it at 80mph it will take you 30 minutes, and will cost you 2 gallons of fuel. If you do it at 40mph it will take you 1 hour and cost you 1 gallon of fuel. So in this contrived example the longer trip has a lower carbon footprint.

In the real world, there are rarely two parallel roads going exactly the same place but just with a different speed limit. Usually you need to drive out of your way to get onto a highway to make your trip go faster. On the other hand driving directly at a slower speed usually entails more starts/stops at traffic lights which eats into your fuel efficiency. Google is probably in a good place to answer the question of how fuel efficient is a given route because they have so much data about average speeds, accelerations/decelerations required/ etc.

For example, a super-fast route that's up an extremely-steep incline on the way may technically be faster from point A to B, but would be less carbon efficient than taking a slightly-longer route that is flatter.

As a simple, unimaginative example. I'm sure you can think of others if you put in the time.

[1]: For some reason, both Google Maps and Apple Maps have terrible contrast, to the point where they're completely unusable for me in dark mode, especially while driving. Apple Carplay is useless to me for this reason. Garmin's default map theme is pretty decent, but they actually let you change map themes, and load custom ones if you're so inclined. So I made the street lines bright and bold, with high-contrast keylines. It's an absolute joy to use now.

The latter two use cases are exactly what a map is supposed to be for. Hence, Google Maps suck at being a map.

I look at the options that Citymapper gives and then have to recalculate the route, in my head, correcting for wrong decisions about where I'll have access to a bike.

(Yes, it'll be quicker if I cycle my own bike from my home to the nearest station. No, I won't be cycling a hire bike 111 minutes away from its closest docking port.)

I can get from point A to point B faster and with less energy expenditure (I think) on a bike.

Theoretically running is even more inefficient (depending on speed apparently) but I hate doing it and it spikes my appetite in a way that makes dieting unsustainable. Maybe it’s genetic, I remember my dad going through a phase where he ran enough to the point where he could do a half marathon while obese; he easily consumed more than he burned despite a very heavy training schedule.

I can walk for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, or almost literally all day and still eat less than I use which is extremely efficient for my goals but extremely inefficient at making me fat.

Google themselves do this with their shared branding under the google umbrella.

Companies that want the upside of this branding need to accept the downsides too.

EDIT: I'd also note that in the book Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff discusses how Pokemon Go was seen in investor circles as a successful demonstration of manipulating masses of people to go to commercial spaces by luring them with imaginary characters. This sent market caps soaring. When I saw this headline, I immediately thought that this is them doing that with maps, but in a PR friendly way.

I suppose it is not _entirely_ out of the realm of possibility, but I'd be willing to bet that they won't end up taking that "route".