Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackhaz | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the rant, but is there a navigation app that allows to turn off all those alerts and notifications? This is horrible. You begin driving with Google Maps and are barraged with endless pop ups like "would you like to save 2 minutes?" or "do you know this is a toll road?" or something else. The damn thing won't shut up and demands so much attention instead navigating - THIS is what's really unsafe.

Also, the overdensity of information on the screen is mind-boggling. Combined with the choice of mild designer palette robbing all the contrast - I wonder if this is only me struggling? Or am I getting old?

View on HN

Ugh, worst of it for me was a trip back from the Olympic peninsula late at night a while back -- Apple kept trying to auto-reroute me to a path that would have me waiting 3+ hours for the ferry instead of driving around the peninsula (<2 hr). So now it's dark, raining, I'm on unfamiliar roads, and I have to keep taking my hands off the wheel and fucking with my phone to get it to just keep on doing what I configured it to do in the first place.

I cannot fathom why the "No, I don't want that route, keep me on the one I picked" interaction is not treated as permanent.

Edit: I just checked and they still seem to think the Kingston-Edmonds ferry is some sort of magical warp drive that instantly transports you from A to B in precisely 1 half hour from your arrival at either endpoint.

Commenting from the Bainbridge ferry line here. Google Maps saw that traffic was backed up and "helpfully" offered me an alternate route that would only end with me cutting into a line ahead of the 50 cars patiently waiting.

Oh wow, I wonder if that explains it: yesterday I saw some truly astonishing line-cutting right in that spot, to the point where I confronted one of the cutters about it after confirming with an attendant that what they'd done wasn't kosher. I thought the person in question was playing dumb, but maybe they were thoughtlessly following map directions.

Anyway, thank you very much for not cutting. It's extraordinarily aggravating to sit lined up down the highway for hours only to see someone sail in ahead of everyone via a sneaky right turn.

A viable approach if you're up for it is a mad frenzy of honking at the driver under question. Works wonders in the Mexico-America border crossings, where folks will try to slip in at the last minute of a 3 hour line.

The locals wont particularly care for you. But they may become incentivized to put up signs, or otherwise disincentivize the activity at an infrastructure-level.

Definitely would have gone for some honking if it wouldn't have been ambiguous who it was at - this was one thing happening on the side of a busy intersection.

> But they may become incentivized to put up signs, or otherwise disincentivize the activity at an infrastructure-level.

Yeah, addressing it at the infrastructure level is definitely the way to go. According to the attendant, the local PD usually physically blocks the lane people were using to cut, but the PD was out to lunch at that moment.

The part I found amazing was that even without the barrier, cutting would require

1) being a massive asshole by design

2) driving so obliviously to your surroundings (immediately visible giant fucking line of waiting cars) that you're being a massive asshole regardless of intent

Idk about the distribution between the two, but either way, yes please to infra-level solutions.

I've been riding the Washington State ferries for over 50 years, so I wasn't tricked into cutting. Tourists and recent transplants would easily fall into this trap though. The Bainbridge line is particularly problematic as the cutting mostly happens at the last intersection, which is also heavily used by local traffic. There are signs, but some of them are a little confusing. For example, the requirement to ignore the HOV lane markings when getting into the line that forms on the road approaching the terminal.

So, the afternoon/evening of November 24, 2019, I was driving, my wife was navigating, and my mom and step-dad were in the back of the rental car, driving from Turin to Genoa on the A6. Unbeknownst to us, there was a major bridge collapse on the A6 between Turin and Genoa. (Edit: I originally thought it was the August 2018 collapse in roughly the same area.)

Google Maps seemed to kind of know there was a problem, and kind of not know... it got us in a loop of getting on and off of the freeway, literally in a loop. So, I just decided there must be a problem ahead, and went a bit further along the detour it kept starting us on, and it eventually found us a proper detour. It's very strange that Google Maps routing heuristics put us on the detour when we were on the freeway, and re-routed us to the freeway as soon as we got on the detour.

We looped twice while I was weighing the relative merits of forcing Google Maps to bring us further down the freeway vs. forcing Google Maps to bring us further down the detour, and exactly the best way to accomplish that.

On a side note, don't drive in Italy, particularly with a navigator with aphantasia who isn't used to GPS lag, particularly in downtown Rome. We came very close to accidentally entering restricted traffic zones during restricted times, and narrowly avoided large fines, in both Rome and Florence.

> a navigator with aphantasia

Curious what you think aphantasia has to do with this?

Probably a malapropism. s/aphantasia/amnesia

Just for my own personal interest, did you already know the two words aphantasia and amnesia? If so, would you mind rank-ordering the following three possibilities in your mind when you posted the comment:

- GP comment mixed up the two words

- GP comment intended aphantasia in a way that makes sense but you do not yet know how

- GP comment intended aphantasia but that does not make sense

I make heavy use of mental imagery while navigating. Is that not the case for most people without aphantasia?

I knew the words. I did not expect it to have been a mixup as amnesia is a much more commonly used term. I posted the comment because I am aphantastic as well but have no difficulty navigating, in fact I am typically delegated to for the task (across urban, cross-country, and backcountry environments).

Thank you! Good point.

I thought my wife's aphantasia is related to her difficulty in orienting a map and figuring out where she is on the map. If GPS is off by half a block and/or the magnetic compass has the map mis-oriented by more than 45 degrees, then it's very difficult for her to compensate. Certainly, when I navigate by map, imagining the street scene overlaid when looking at the map and imagining the map overlaid when looking at the street scene are huge aids to navigation. She's not able to generate that augmented reality in her imagination, and I attributed that lack of mental augmented reality to her difficulty in using maps.

Generally, I'd prefer to navigate and let my wife drive, but she's used to driving in countries where they drive on the left, and I'm used to driving in countries where they drive on the right. Also, if a manual transmission is significantly cheaper to rent, then I end up driving, regardless of which side of the road the locals drive. More than once, I've down-shifted while turning on my wipers instead of my turn signal while entering a roundabout. At least car manufacturers don't flip the shift pattern right-to-left when changing which side the steering wheel is on.

Can you add a waypoint halfway along your intended route, to avoid the ferry suggestion? Not that you should have to…

Multistop mapping was only added this most recent release I believe

Maps seems painfully bad at ferries in general. It didn't even know about the one that was the most direct route when I was visiting Vancouver Island - kept recommending smaller routes that would take me hours or if my way.

It boggles me how they ever decided that requiring touch screen interaction while driving is an acceptable default.

“Alert! Tap this little region of a touch screen now or else your map will be replaced with a route that you’ve had no opportunity to review.”

As an infrequent car user (hence the map; I know bike routes well) I am usually fully preoccupied with just trying not to die.

Hate this. So much. It's effectively demanding interaction from a user they know is operating a vehicle.

It's a terrible design. A Scandinavian auto magazine that I can't recall the name of did a test this year, and found that touch screens are across-the-board more distracting than physical pushbuttons. Which is obvious to anyone who's ever driven a car and used touchscreen buttons, but sometimes it's nice to have hard figures to back up the obvious.

Apple Maps at least only changes the route if you interact with it.

Waze allows you turn off most alerts. For each type of alert, you can configure whether it should be shown on the map and whether it should issue a vocal alert.

Google maps lets you mute announcements: https://youtu.be/eSjv8m7lv30?t=45

100% agree.

Google Maps sucks now. It's full of ads, pop ups, etc cluttering the interface. Also- why are we asking drivers to report things while they're supposed to be driving?

The experience while driving with Android has gotten terrible. In 2013 everything worked, now we are moving backwards.

Apple allows voice reporting via Siri. I’ve not mastered the lingo, but it’s good to know it’s an option.

It must depend on the countries. In Europe I have never seen a pop-up or ad in Google Maps.

I can hardly imaging what this would actually be like - maybe the kind I saw in Waze where local stores are advertised as being at x minutes away without being asked?

'Pop up' here is referring to notifications like 'we found a faster route, press X to stay on the current route' and other such annoyances despite putting the thing in a mode where it knows I'm driving.

Is this speed-trap still here? yes/no

When I open Google Maps, I see a map of my current location and at the bottom I see, "Latest in <your town>" which shows photos people took of local businesses and food. These are ads. What does a picture of somebody's meal have to do with navigation?

Ah, this. Yes, I have it too on the Maps main interface (though it is just a line I can expand). The important thing (at least for me) is that it is not present during navigation.

I usually appreciate this feature but being unable to turn it off is annoying. When driving from LA to SF I often find it a poor choice. Anyway, the option I use is to waypoint my path deliberately so that I hit the right spots and then it can't nav you away from the path.

You need a passenger with you, but I have noticed this is more a problem on longer routes. And on longer routes, I have a passenger with me anyway.

Google maps shows the alts as grey lines but there is no interruption because of them, well very rare unless there is a big time save.

I lived by Waze in DC. Want to know if the usual route home was going to take one hour or three? It was the only way to find out and was semi-reliable and updated rapidly. I did not always trust its routes but once I knew a few alternatives it could help me choose the right one.

On a couple occasions, Google Maps kept suggesting and autoselecting a "shorter" route. Upon selecting it, though, my ETA increased by 40 minutes instead of dropping like it said it would.

I kept having to dismiss it until the "shortcut" was passed.

That’s so bad. I have experienced similar things and now I don’t use any maps within my city as I know all routes and it’s a relief not having to constantly look at the screen and switch back to road.

What I fail to understand is, I guess everyone on the dev team of google maps, is actually using the app on almost daily basis. Why can’t they see its flaws, how can they not be passionate to improve something that they themselves use daily and when they are even getting paid to improve it.

This is ripe for a new player to jump in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com