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Comment by santialbo | Hacker News Reader

This December I used Google maps for a ~2hour car drive. The selected route sent me through mountain pass with lots of curves. Being below -10 degrees I didn't think it was the best alternative so I decided to look at the map myself.

There was an alternative that used mostly highways and decent roads that only took 10 more minutes.

I still don't understand why the curvy road was the default option.

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Maybe Google Maps just didn't have enough data about that road or there was a jam on the highway. There are a lot of factors to consider and knobs to tune. In old days navigating software was just looking for a shortest possible way, which given that only main roads were known, was quite a reasonable algorithm. Nowadays all the main players have not just highways and city streets, but also trails and unpaved roads, traffic information, road danger (bad pavement, potholes), et al. There are quite funny accidents because of all these, e.g. I remember reading about Google Maps sending people via a muddy road where most of the cars stucked [1]

1. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/26/us/google-maps-detour-col...

>I still don't understand why the curvy road was the default option.

Because when the locals punch in an address across the mountains and it says highway they ignore it and take the shortcut so the ML learns the shortcut but not the "except in blizzard conditions" exception.

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