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Comment by senkora | Hacker News Reader

> It's early in the year. You want to drive straight through the middle of Chinatown in SF. Why might that be a bad idea?

I feel like a Google Maps-style system would discover this automatically by noting via phone location data that there is heavy traffic in Chinatown.

(I do get the author’s point, but I think that factually this example would not be a problem)

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Unfortunately, I just had this experience with Google Maps last month—I wanted to go to downtown to buy cheese at Pike Place, but I didn't realize that 6th avenue was closed off for the annual Pride Parade. Traffic was horrible, and Google Maps kept telling me to turn right onto closed off streets until I just had to abandon my trip entirely. Definitely some lack of communication between Seattle city planning and the Google maps team, but even the existing Google Maps systems weren't able to react fast enough to give me any warnings and the time estimation was laughably incorrect.

SPD close off certain directions of traffic after Mariner's games. It's always the same layout, always after Mariner's games, and Google still tries to send me through the area the wrong way every time

A couple years ago Apple Maps did not know that roads in downtown SF were closed for Bay to Breakers. Thankfully the cops were still setting up barriers and I was able to weave around them to reach the Bay Bridge.

This kind of thing happens regularly.

I had the same experience trying to see the 4th of July fireworks in an unfamiliar city. It doesn't help that there was very little information online about which roads were closed.

Maps apps see the streets that don’t have cars on them (the same ones closed for a festival) as good routes to send vehicles because there’s currently no vehicles using them. It keeps trying to route people there and doesn’t understand why.

I think it takes someone (at Google) manually marking those roads as unavailable before it will stop trying. I’ve seen it happen with other things too, like if a highway is closed because of a bad accident.

I’m guessing GP’s point is that Google also has the locations of all the people not in cars, so Google Maps could take the hint if it wanted. But thus far nobody appears to care enough to fix this. (And apparently in e.g. India cars and pedestrians may routinely use the same roads at the same time, so perhaps such a system might be more fragile globally that our own experiences would lead us to believe.)

Road closures and accidents are crowdsourced things, so ordinary users can contribute intel live from the scene.

Google is able to estimate crowd sizes in a business or on a public transit vehicle. This seems to be based on the number of Android devices reporting their location in a cluster. Maps could obviously make inferences if there were large crowds of people, not moving in vehicles.

That's not how it works. Maps will see that the average speed of cars around Chinatown has slowed to a crawl, and it will route drivers elsewhere. They also get lists of planned closures from local traffic agencies, and you'll see these clearly displayed in black and red with little stop signs. (The quality of this data obviously varies wildly though.)

Accidents on highways are a different story because there are rarely any alternatives, or if there are, they're so much slower that it still makes sense to suffer through the 30 min jam.

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