Hacker News Reader

Comment by darrmit | Hacker News Reader

Surely someone here knows better than me, but it seems Google's dominance in this space is not due to pure mapping data (although that also seems to be the best in the world) - it's due to the massive amounts of data the join in with the mapping data to provide real-time road closure and traffic information as well as what the "best route" is.

Apple Maps has taken me some really strange routes (I live in a rural area) while Google consistently picks the route you'd expect.

I've been hoping for a Google alternative because their monopoly on mapping that leads to further data collection is terrifying, but I'm bearish on the idea of pure mapping data being it.

View on HN

in my experience they both take dumb routes. I still long for options like avoiding left hand turns (especially unprotected turns), very short merges (frequently end up with silly routes that have you cross four lanes of heavy traffic). The other issue I have is everyone seems to over-optimize the travel time. I don't care if taking a different route could save me two minutes. If it's nothing but stop lights thats not helpful. Tesla has a neat feature where you can tell it how many minutes an alternative route needs to save before it suggests it. Obviously if a route is going to save me 20 minutes then sure, thats probably worth it.

The other thing that I've been thinking about is how dangerous these directions can be in areas that get bad weather. I've had both Apple and Google try to direct me to take a very steep hill when it's icy out instead of taking the treated highway that would add five minutes to the drive. They need better understanding of road surfaces and weather.

> Google consistently picks the route you'd expect.

This definitely isn't my experience. For me, Google consistently picks more dangerous routes even if they offer little to no time savings. The app consistently tries to kill me by doing things like routing me through crazy 5-way intersections when it could just as easily send me one street over for no additional time cost.

Most big cities publish data on their most dangerous intersections, so it's not like it should be an especially hard problem to fix.

Wouldn't it create traffic problems if they start routing everyone through side streets around the main intersections?

Where I live, Google maps like to suggest this one comically evil route that takes you across 3 lanes of traffic, through a "roundabout" then across the 3 lanes of opposing traffic. On a highway. While yes, the "roundabout" does exist, its there for only two reasons: for emergency vehicles to idle in and for routing traffic when the segment of highway beyond is closed.

Published data is a catch-22. Dangerous intersections may look worse than other options simply due to the fact that they're more heavily used. In my area, I have 3 different options to get to the same location:

1. Take the most western-route to a traffic light, make a right, and then another right into the destination.

2. Take a more slightly eastern single-lane back road that puts me right out at the destination with still an immediate right onto the main road before getting there (danger factor in the single-lane aspect)

3. Take the most eastern route, make an unprotected left turn onto the main highway (often having to use the center median lane as a buffer for space), and then make another unprotected left into the destination.

Option 1 would show the most published crash data since it's a traffic-light intersection and is most busy by default, while I'd argue that it's also still the safest.

Yup. Google tries to get me to make a left turn from a stop sign across 4 lanes of main street suburban traffic rather than waiting at the traffic light one block north - a light that that also backs traffic up past the stop sign when the main street traffic flow stops. I wrote them a couple of times a few years back, but I've learned to ignore the directions.

Maybe it’s easier to contact your municipality about this dangerous abomination.

I imagine the algorithm that Google is using to send you to that route is simply that other users before you that have used that route have progressed quicker than others that used the "safe" one.

To your point, Logan Airport in Boston is a pain to drive to, except there is a freeway that goes directly there. However, Google Maps directions starting north of Boston (Bedford area, for example) will drive you through the industrial port area where roads are not well paved, painted, or marked, all to save 1m of travel time. Apple Maps puts you on the freeway as expected (this was my experience pre-pandemic).

On the flip side, Apple Maps has led me to closed roads and routes that don't actually exist, while Google Maps has never done that.

No one solution will be perfect, as they don't have exactly the same goals.

Google maps have led me to a military use only road. I literally didn't know they existed in my country before :P

is not due to pure mapping data

Two big factors were that Google made itself an early mover in this space, and it made the product available for free.

In the world before Google Maps, maps were frightfully expensive, or tremendously outdated.

I worked for a company that subscribed to a digital mapping service. We paid large sums of money each year for the right to use the maps. In addition to having a dedicated terminal, we even had a full-time staffer whose job was to touch up the generated maps for our purposes.

Then Google bought Keyhole, and made all of its treasures available to the public for free.

It's like someone opened a bakery and gave away bread for free until all the other bakeries went out of business. A business model that drug dealers sometimes use.

Then the remaining Google bakery decided that the way it would make money from its bread monopoly is to collect personal data on everyone who eats bread, while pretending that the bread is available at no cost.

Adding an anecdatum here to match a sibling -- Google maps has become a bit of a joke in my family. It consistently does everything it can to avoid putting us on major highways despite not having that option checked. It has taken us on crazy back-country roads constant going 25mph in deer season in pitch black to save us 1 minute rather than putting us on the highway. If we get back on the highway, it just tries to route us back onto the country road as soon as physically possible.

Apple Maps may have less data and thus not always be up to date, but in the 6 months we've been using it since I got a new iPhone, it has never once steered us on a path we didn't expect. Every time we get in the car we can choose to use my phone or my wife's and we always pick mine for that reason.

Google made a change a while back to offer the most energy efficient ("greenest") route. Maybe a frontage road at 40mph burns less fuel than 75mph on the interstate?

The big thing I'd ask on that is "How much time did the really strange routes cost you?" Because in the real world, a route being "strange" is often somewhat irrelevant if your goal is to get from point A to point B.

Apple Maps is so much closer to feature/quality parity to Google Maps than most people realize because of the negative publicity surrounding its launch.

A whole lot of people on iPhones just don't use Apple Maps for that reason but I think it's easily the preferable choice of the two.

I think the overall design of the UI is smoother, simpler, and better. One example where Google is behind: you can't add the Transit overlay and use 3D at the same time. Google's 3D building view is cluttered and can't be seen zoomed out as much as in Apple Maps.

When you zoom and scroll around in Apple Maps, it consistently has higher framerates and less stutters than Google.

I also love the quality and performance of Look Around, despite it not being as comprehensive as Street View.

Yeah, Google naturally does have heaps of data. But it's mobile device data. It's really hard for them to figure out when people are in cars, buses, bikes, etc. Did you ever see the artist that created "red traffic jams" on google maps by using 100 phones in a kiddy trailer?

TOmTom's mentioned it a bit over the years, having something like 600 million connected devices. Every satnav, car with their maps in, reports traffic data back. Majority cars on the road use TT traffic data I think.

As for routing algos, they vary a lot and the map isnt entirely responsible for how effective they are.

There definitely needs to be an alternate to google, you're right there. Data is the start, hopefully with this news, it consolidates the competition, so its everyone vs google. not just google versus an uncoordinated mass

> It's really hard for them to figure out when people are in cars, buses, bikes, etc. Did you ever see the artist that created "red traffic jams" on google maps by using 100 phones in a kiddy trailer?

I don't think it's got much to do with the map data being hard to figure at as much as "carrying 100 phones set to a car trip up and down the road in a hand pulled wagon for an hour" being an irrelevant thing to worry about. 100 people aren't going to be driving on top of each other with the directions accidentally set to walk very often and outside of that kind of use case the data is going to be extraordinarily accurate.

> Google's dominance in this space is not due to pure mapping data (although that also seems to be the best in the world)

That depends on type of data and area, in many cases OSM data is superior or as good (or as bad) as Goggle data.

For POIs and car-centric info in rich countries Google clearly dominates, for hiking and cycling data OSM is much better and so on.

Business Profiles on Google Maps drives the monopoly.

If you want your business found on Google Maps, you need to provide the address, hours, etc. This is one of the first things you do when you open a business, even if you don't have a website.

Not many people bother to add the same to OpenStreetMap and that's why everyone uses Google over OSM to search for businesses.

Well, when I registered an LLC in the US, Google mailed me a postcard to confirm my address, and third-party providers begin calling to help "claim my Google listing". So they've really created an ecosystem that you immediately become part of rather than something you have to seek out. Edit: I also completely agree that this is what drives the monopoly.

Sounds like there is hope: if Google can find you, so can the Overture Foundation.

Apple Maps in the areas I've lived in has been just as good (and bad) in routing and real time info. That wasn't always true but in the last few years it certainly is. With Google Maps declining into ad placements (for things I'll never go to at that) and Apple Maps continuing to get better the choice has been pretty easy lately.

I use osmand and have no issues with it. Haven't needed Google maps in some years so some of it might be people just don't know about the alternatives.

have you ever tried Yandex Navigator, I've just started using it I am surprised how much is it accurate!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com