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Comment by throwway120385 | Hacker News Reader

throwway120385

I think this is why Google preferentially wanted to take me down a 45 MPH state route that runs downhill and has curves and no separation between the bike lane and vehicle traffic instead of the nice, calm, traffic-less series of roads in residential neighborhoods that was accessible with a quarter-mile detour. Those roads didn't have sidewalks or bike lanes marked on the roads, so they were totally unsafe for a cyclist. As opposed to the 45 MPH road, which is perfectly safe because it has a bike lane.

This is a great project.

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No Google has definitely gotten progressively worse at navigating. The original satnav system in my 2004 Prius was very good at the time (probably still mostly is) - "quick" takes the presumed speed of a "major" road, and calculates with that. It led to mostly sensible routes following main roads. These were routes I would've picked myself from a map book.

Google Maps these days...just doesn't seem to do that. They've overweighted their traffic management algorithm or something, but it seems to have no notion of the idea that you can't negotiate 50kmh residential roads with a turn every block at anything close to 50kmh, and such a drive is incredibly stressful. And then will do other things like conclude that a side-road against traffic turn into a main road (so right for me, equiv to a left in the US) is something that will easily be done any time of day rather then consist of waiting for a gap in 4 lanes of traffic.

I suspect it's more than active traffic management, some of it is bound to be probing streets for which they don't have sufficient data.

I've noticed weird little detours in areas where I'm familiar with but engaged navigation merely for an ETA. To me those little detours that don't save time or avoid construction suggest I'm being used to probe those side streets. It's like being a human ICMP packet.

This was a “feature” in Waze in which you would be rewarded (with “candy”) for accepting non-standard routes. It helped them find alternative paths to recommend.

Google has since purchased Waze and now recently merged the teams.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/tech/google-waze-maps-merge/i...

It might be sacrilege but I find Apple Maps is better now.

In my city the bike lanes are almost all death traps because they only exist to rake in federal funding with no care for making them useful or safe. I avoid them whenever possible. They routed one "lane" onto a narrow sidewalk under a wide railroad bridge and had to change a city ordinance prohibiting bikes on sidewalks in that region of the city.

Do you, too, live in San Jose?

My favorite feature of bike lanes there is how highway access ramps straight up cross them -

- creating a flow of cars accelerating to highway speeds coming from behind and sideways from you, while you are in the perfect spot to be obscured by the car's A-frame.

Or perhaps how I had to move away a sign saying "SHARE THE ROAD" (with bicycles, presumably) from the bicycle path. Multiple times.

No, perhaps my favorite is how the Mayor decided to show off our bicycling infrastructure by taking a bicycle ride the first day of the year, and. . .

. . . was promptly hit by an SUV, which broke his bones[1].

If you don't live in San Jose, that's all you need to know about cycling in San Jose.

[1] https://abc7news.com/san-jose-mayor-hit-by-car-bicyclist/500...

Here’s the Belgian version with a good part of the population commuting by bike and the politics by taxi:

"Health minister and deputy prime minister open car doors into busy bicycle lane."

https://www.politico.eu/article/belgian-ministers-send-cycli...

Compare to European cities San Jose definitely is bad on bike infrastructure. But if you compare to neighbor cities like Santa Clara (low bar, I know), it's pretty ok. Sam Liccardo at least actually cares about cycling around the city, and made bike infrastructure improvements, like 3rd around downtown (yes it took some time after the change to educate our bright drivers how to make right turns there correctly, but it mostly works now).

And San Jose's Department of Transportation traffic signal unit at least has an email address I can use to tell them which traffic signal failed to detect bicycle and turn green, and they actually fix them.

I live in San Jose, and bike a lot, and all three of my kids bike to school, too (I accompany the 2nd grader). Everything you say is true and correct. But, San Jose is still far more bike friendly than the vast majority of American cities, both in terms of driver awareness and infrastructure. An increasing number of marked bike lanes on secondary streets every year, a formal program for road diets on dangerous (for everyone) primary surface streets, sharrows on lots of residential streets, and enough North-South MUTs to facilitate many commuters.

I live in Willow Glen and used to commute to Google in Sunnyvale. About 2mi to get to the GRT, then connect to the Bay Trail in Alviso, and about a half mile of streets to get to the campus. It's not just SJ, but the existence of the Bay Trail, the GRT, the San Tomas Aquino Trail, the Stevens Creek Trail, and even the Los Gatos Creek Trail all make a big difference for cyclists around here.

> the Mayor decided to show off our bicycling infrastructure by taking a bicycle ride the first day of the year, and. . . . . . was promptly hit by an SUV, which broke his bones

Your description may conflate the 2017 archival video with Mayor Sam Liccardo’s 2019 New Year’s Day bike ride.

The archival footage comes from a 2017 event touting Ford biking infrastructure, but the reporting does not say that the New Year’s Day bike ride was part of a promotional event.

Are we talking about the time the car hit the mayor on his bike in 2017, or the time the car hit a different mayor in 2019, or the more recent one in 2023?

Either way, when you ram your car into a bicycle it is known as "el san jose hola" or "The San Jose Hello" around here.

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