It would be nice if they could offer an option to avoid roads with histories of crashes (like tolls and ferries).
One example I have is there is an intersection on my way home that Tesla maps (and Google maps) wants me to turn left at. The problem is that its a left turn without a signal, across 4 lanes of traffic with limited visibility. This is a recipe for crashes, and I've seen multiple crashes here. However, if you go 1/4mi out of your way then you go under a bridge and wind up at an on-ramp to the same road .. no left turn needed.
It took me a while to discover this route when I moved here. It would be nice if there was a "safer route detected, +1 minute" option presented to me.
I've been wishing for this too. Not fastest or most fuel efficient, but the easiest route. Really just as few turns as possible, but especially avoiding things like two way stops and uncontrolled left turns.
I would love this. Driving in Seattle is such a massive pain sometimes, and Google Maps just loves to make you take crazy turns across 3 lanes of traffic when there's a ramp or a light two blocks away. My partner who has lived here her whole life is always telling me that I'm taking bad turns when I'm following Google Maps haha
Same in the Bay Area. Google maps was always trying to get me to take crazy turns instead of the straightforward way. Save 30 seconds by going on the 101 for an eighth of a mile instead of just driving straight on el Camino. There were a bunch of places i thought were far away because of the crazy routes that turned out to be really convenient to get to once the crazy uncle shortcuts were left behind.
Apple Maps has this mode at least when picking a route. It usually gives a fastest and a fewer-turns option.
I’ve also found their turn by turn directions less stressful to follow than google maps because they announce like a human codriver not like you’re an AI. At least a few years ago it felt like Google Maps didn’t do the whole “go through this light then at the next one turn left”, which is easier than a last minute “turn left now!!”
I've gotten this sense as well, but have been trying to convince myself that it's just me thinking that the "grass is always greener". It's crazy to think that Apple maps might actually end up being what makes me finally ditch Android.
I've been leaving feedback in Google Maps with exactly this suggestion every time it takes me to one of those dangerous left turns. If presented with one on my route I always take a right and then do a u-turn.
Google maps has not been getting the hint at forbidden left turns :/
I'd guess that if you consistently avoid a left turn it could be because it's forbidden instead of because you miss it every single time. It's safe to assume that by now they take this kind of implicit feedback, but it either takes a long time to be processed or it's not happening on time-restricted left turns..
It's bizarre that TikTok can genuinely determine roughly what I am in the mood for within a few videos, but Google Maps can't learn my preferences based on how I travel. The former seems far, far harder - and Google has almost my entire location history recorded from the last 10ish years!
Because TikTok is built to be a personalized social media, but Google Maps is not built to be a personalized route finding service. I can imagine adding such personalization will make most of the caches in route finding unusable. I would instead argue Google has a much harder job than TikTok. TikTok getting your mood has no consequence; Google Maps getting your route wrong has consequences.
Google doesn't care. Maps is there to sell ad space to companies, you're the product, not the customer.
To highlight this, it is literally impossible to choose your own route. Google will randomly redirect you, will keep nagging, while you constantly have to click 'no'.
For example, let's say you are driving from New York to California. There are two main paths, dictated by the mountains.
Google knows this, and lets you pick the southern, or northern route.
The southern route is 5 hours longer, but gee, no snow! Google doesn't have "avoid snow", and 5 hours longer becomes much faster, if the northern route has a storm.
So you pick the southern route.
Congrats! For the next 50 hours of driving, google will happily exclaim "I found a faster route!" and switch you over, unless you click cancel.
This means that you are constantly, sometimes as often as every 5 minutes, forced to interact with maps while driving, or be forced to redirect as google wishes.
This 5 year old bug is well known, people complain about it everywhere, but google could care less.
If I was the product manager on maps, I'd keep it exactly as it is.
The worst thing is for maps to be "silent" when there's a route available that can save you half a day of driving. You don't want that but an average driver does.
You are basically a power user who knows better than the map which is fine, but then just add a waypoint that forces the Southern route and go on with your life.
For the average user, nagging them to get the 5 hour faster route is the right strategy.
For iOS, google maps is very often the only way google can geographically target you with accuracy for better ads, as users will deny location requests to the other google apps
> It's safe to assume that by now they take this kind of implicit feedback, but it either takes a long time to be processed or it's not happening on time-restricted left turns..
I wouldn't count on that. I've been exiting a Costco for years now where Google Maps tells you to take an impossible left turn due to a divided road. Google should have a mountain of data showing those directions are never, ever, taken. Street view shows it to be impossible too.
If they are actually looking at that type of data they aren't doing much with it.
I'd recommend it over any other maps app (e.g. OSMAnd). It uses Google's Maps, but just has a better interface around it.
The tolls option is great. Rather than having an "avoid tolls" setting, it just gives you multiple options and let you decide in the moment. For example, you might enter a destination and it'll give you 3 results:
- 35 min, no tolls
- 30 min, $2 tolls
- 28 min, $9 tolls
Google Maps doesn't understand the concept of "some tolls", nor "I want tolls sometimes, but only if I'm in a hurry or the time saving is significant".
Everything else is just that little bit nicer too.
What I like about ViaMichelin’s app is that it will calculate fuel and toll cost for a route. French highways are very expensive so the longer no-toll route can be a money saver (particularly when you have a rental with unlimited kilometres and don’t mind taking the longer “scenic route”).
Sometimes it’s not even much of an increased distance, just departmental roads with a lower speed limit.
And gas/food is always cheaper off the highway, but I will admit French highway service stations do have fairly clean and free bathrooms.
> I will admit French highway service stations do have fairly clean and free bathrooms.
I recently told my children how it was like to take the highway during summer time about 40 years ago when I was a kid.
They had all kind of entertainment, large tents for families with babies (and free diapers). There also was a sort of large national game for children where they would "hunt the spoils" - get points for actions that reduced fuel use (opening windows, checking tires pressure, etc.)
There are no more such things today, the areas are just overcrowded - but I agree that they are very well organized.
I love OSMand for hiking and the ability to find routes and keep getting instructions even when you have no cell service is great for that use case. But I agree, for driving Waze is hard to beat. In particular the reaction to traffic data is great.
I've seen google maps suggest multiple routes with varying toll costs when driving in Southern India. Not sure what their criteria is for showing them.
Google Maps has more efficient driving routes. I've been using Waze for years, but recently switched back to Google Maps for this reason after I noticed Waze taking me a much further route to save about ten minutes but use a lot more fuel.
Waze has always been the driving equivalent of "knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing" app, IME. It'll take me through weird neighborhood streets that see (and probably SHOULD see) very little traffic to "save" 0.1 mi on a trip, ending with a cross-traffic uncontrolled turn costing me 3, 5, 8 minutes.
I like it for intra-town commutes where I know where I'm going already and just want to possibly try something new, but if I've never been to a place before or want the "works best 80% of the time" route, maps all the way.
My number one request would be a way to avoid counties with a history of civil asset forfeiture. Hopefully having the option would draw attention to the issue and I don't want to stop for food, gas, etc in places that use it.
It'd be good to have a way to avoid sundown towns, too. I wouldn't personally be subject to hate but I don't want to accidentally give them any of my time or money.
a) Keeping and curating a list of sundown towns (or choosing some 3rd party who's list they like) is exactly the kind of issue big tech shouldn't be wading into.
b) I'm going to laugh my butt off when they, in an attempt to be neutral, define it algorithmically and all the rich waspy inner ring suburban enclaves that HN loves because "good schools" wind up on the list too.
> Keeping and curating a list of sundown towns (or choosing some 3rd party who's list they like) is exactly the kind of issue big tech shouldn't be wading into.
I don't see why -- but if that's the case, they could simply offer a way to let users exclude[0] towns the user chooses. As a bonus, this would work for more than sundown towns. Let's say you don't want to go through a town where your ex lives, or whatever.
0: I really mean "increase the cost of travel through these regions" so the app will try to avoid them rather than never send the user through them.
Why do you think tech companies shouldn't make the equivalent of a little green book available? Do you think they (or a third party) will get it wrong?
There probably isn't a handy pre-made list but there should be court filings that are relatively easy to search. Typically it would be something like Foo vs $xx,xxx since the seized money is on trial, not a person. I'm sure a company as big as Google or Apple could figure out some way to gather and parse that data if they wanted to.
The option I want is “old people are in the car. Choose a route that won’t make them scream ‘where are you going?? I’ve been taking the same route for 40 years!’”
Ironically, Conan O'Brien visited Waze headquarters in Tel Aviv and jokingly complained about just this problem (although I'm sure it's not the same intersection).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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?
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.
'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.
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.
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.
Speculation, but probably their legal department feels like that'd be a sort of implied warranty, and if the route wasn't appreciably safer (what does that even mean? Surely reasonable people/people with a different set of strengths & weaknesses will differ), they might open themselves up to lawsuits?
Possibly a similar situation if they claim they can tell one route is safer than another, but then don't give you the safer option?
which i like, but "least stressful" for me would be avoiding busy intersections, or road construction, areas with lots of accidents, crime-ridden areas.
I frequently take more complicated back roads to avoid areas like the above.
When the total distance traveled for the shortest vs fastest option is very high, Google always shows both the options (or at least, some versions of them).
I think safest route is hard to define, especially given that the data is not dense and may not be relevant (e.g., an intersection had a lot of historical accidents so its technically unsafe based on data but it has been rebuilt recently and there has been no accident since so its currently safe).
Microsoft's attempt was branded as racist[0]. I don't think any of these companies are likely to touch this feature in the US. I did see an article about Waze doing this in Brazil in 2016, but not sure if that's still happening.
I (in Australia) want preferences about avoiding right turns across busy roads (equivalent to left turns in the US). I use Google Maps and it seems to constantly choose options with all of the difficult turns.
Passengers in my car (ie my family) want an option that prevents the driver from complaining about the navigation.
Just an FYI, when Google Maps comes up with routes, there are penalties for complex maneuvers built in when ranking routes. An unprotected left will add a time penalty to the route option when it is ranked against alternatives. I understand what you are hoping for is a much harsher penalty (or maybe even a way to customize it completely), but wanted to point out that things like U-turns and other maneuvers are treated as penalties
> I (in Australia) want preferences about avoiding right turns across busy roads (equivalent to left turns in the US). I use Google Maps and it seems to constantly choose options with all of the difficult turns.
This would be incredibly useful in congested areas. Good feature suggestion.
I would like google map add the cost of turns to the length of route. It always turns a lot(sometimes even zigzag) and think it would be sooner to arrive at the target.
But that isn't really the case in city area.
I would like a option that avoid turns if possible unless it is really too far.
This is seriously needed near me - there are a couple of freeway interchanges with notorious merges that sport accidents bad enough that at least a couple cars get towed every week. Not sure it would cause the idiots that cut in and cause them (and who usually get off scott free) to shape up but would at least give more heads up to other people to maybe not tailgate at high speed?
I would assume that a statistically significant increase of accidents in an area is due to road design failure and not to lack of driver information. The obvious answer is to fix the road, not add more automated distractions to a drivers attention load.
Generally I agree, we should absolutely design roads to guide drivers into proper behavior, but there are some drivers who are simply way more dangerous than others^, and I'd love to have this feature to know where to be extra alert for other drivers messing up.
I have a fascination with watching dashcam videos on /r/roadcam and /r/idiotsincars (I think it has made me a better/significantly more defensive driver), and seeing some of the videos from places that have fixed cameras that catch every crash just makes it clear that some portion of people simply don't pay attention to anything.
In the 11'8" bridge example (https://11foot8.com/), they've installed a system that detects if the approaching truck is too tall, flashes an "OVER HEIGHT" neon sign, and automatically turns the traffic light red. They even raised the bridge 8 inches a few years ago. People consistently ignore the sign, run the red light, and rip the roof off of their truck on the special bar that was installed to protect the bridge from direct damage.
In the Milwaukee Roundabout example (https://www.youtube.com/@MilwaukeeRoundabout/videos), drivers are coming across the bridge way, way above the speed limit to go sailing as far as they do. Perhaps in this case the road could be narrowed and speed bumps installed, but this is a contingent of drivers who are not paying attention to the road, and the rest of us would benefit from knowing where they screw up.
The 11'8" bridge sign says "OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN". It's terrible, technically correct, signage, like an automotive "PC Load Letter". It's not clear it's saying you specifically are overheight. At least it needs a colon after the first word. I can see why people would sail through that wondering what it means.
Also it flashes up when it detects an over-tall vehicle, but that won't be clear to a vehicle that's never been there before: it probably looks like one of those speed limit signs that flashes to everyone. And yellow-on-black signage is usually not going to tell you "stomp brakes now", usually more like "road closed next week", so it doesn't filter to the front of brain when navigating an intersection.
The Australian water-shower projector is much more obvious that you have to stop right now or bad things will happen to you.
I also think that watching too many hours of dashcam videos makes you a better driver. You end up getting this sense about where the problem is coming from, before it happens.
The other thing you learn is that uninsured motorist insurance is an absolute must. The number of people driving around without insurance is staggering.
>I think it has made me a better/significantly more defensive driver
I am highly, highly suspect of such an assertion. Watching videos of edge cases is at best a really inefficient way to get good at detecting the preceding conditions.
The value of deeply understanding “edge cases” depends a lot on the context. An edge case where my beta release mobile app doesn’t work on some outdated phone when it’s being held upside down is irrelevant. “Edge cases” on the highway lead to tens of thousands of deaths and millions of serious injuries every year, so understanding them is worthwhile, inefficient or not.
There are plenty of very specific scenarios that are easily avoidable crashes, yet constantly show up in these videos. Off the top of my head:
- Being “nice” on multilane surface streets: stopping to let someone turn across your lane (or turning when someone leaves room for you) is dangerous. The other lanes may be moving at different speeds and drivers won’t be able to see or expect someone coming across their lane from between stopped cars. There are countless videos of this scenario.
- “Thing on the highway”: in heavy but fast moving highway traffic, a foreign object on the road will be hidden by cars ahead until the last moment. Following distance helps, but paying attention to cars suddenly changing lanes a few cars ahead is also useful.
- Backing up at a light: a surprising number of stupid crashes happen when someone decides they’re too far into an intersection at a red light, and starts backing up. The driver behind them assumes they’re checking their mirror, but they’re not! I honk and flash my lights proactively based on having seen this fender bender happen in so many videos.
- Mismatched turn lanes: people are terrible at knowing which lane they’re going into in a multiple-lanes-turn-the-same-way intersection.
I'd disagree with you. If you're in the right-hand lane of multiple lanes, traffic is stopped in the left lane but the right hand lane is going through...after seeing this 50 times in dashcam accidents you know that there's somebody making a blind left turn in front of that stopped lane of traffic to your left, and you slow down.
These aren't really edge cases. For some definition of frequent, they happen frequently. There are a lot of near misses...
I have a feeling this would be considered unacceptable ageism elsewhere, but Japan requires some drivers to display a sticker which indicates to "other drivers that the marked driver is not very skilled, either due to inexperience or old age".
Not in the UK, well at least not in England. "P" (for "just Passed the test") signs are quite common on cars but absolutely no requirement for a newly licensed driver to get one.
Is it a road design failure if it's more dangerous to drive above the speed limit?
In Sweden we have some roads with a lot of accidents caused by people driving above the speed limit.
They fixed this by installing automated speed cams. The goal is not to give people speeding tickets but to get drivers to slow down. It works really well so I actually believe this new Waze feature will be really handy.
Edit: Btw, I use Waze to get alert about the speed cams.
> They fixed this by installing automated speed cams.
That is a user hostile way to solve the problem, and it still leaves the design issue open. _Why_ are people driving too fast for what the road can safely allow for?
There's a lot of work being put into road design which naturally calms traffic, and a good part of it shows promise. Large wide open boulevards seem to encourage people to driver faster than what is actually safe because they feel comfortable driving at that speed with that much perceived space.
If you narrow the road, add center island obstructions to limit long distance views, remove outside lanes for parking with curb extensions or put in protected bike lanes, roundabouts, better lane markings, they all seem to make drivers more aware of the density of their environment and work to slow them down naturally.
And again.. this all works to get them paying attention to the environment, not simply trained to wait for an automated alert with financial consequences.
I can think of one intersection in my town with several accidents. It's a cross intersection with stops signs on one street and none on the other. The accidents probably all boil down to some combination of "He won't pull out" and "I'm tired of waiting." A signal light would eliminate this indecision. I fault the road design, because it requires patience people just don't tend to have to use it safely.
Agreed, in principle. There is an intersection on my commute that was almost certainly designed to look pretty and break up the monotony of the grid layout with some elegant curves. Sadly there are accidents almost every single week, most likely because of bad sight lines and how much turning goes on. It would be nice for them to "fix the road" by just straightening it out but it would likely require a staggering amount of time and money because of how much infrastructure has been built up around it. The city has already tried what it can, so I think having the warning in the app is the best we can do in the meantime.
If you're paying, sure. If you're not, the obvious answer is to route away from the accident-prone routes while trying to minimize increases in journey time.
I'm surprised to hear that Waze is doing something. After the Google acquisition, all I'd seen were new voices and new car models to mark your location on the map, nothing else.
Is Google using Waze as their staging platform now? Because Google Maps features aren't incorporated into Waze (lane-based navigation, street names in voice guidance etc).
The Planned Drives feature telling you the best time to leave sounds pretty cool. I just wish there were a good Google alternative for it. Especially if you manage to plot the congestion graph for the entire day.
assuming they have the data, it would be great for them to publish a report of the most dangerous roads. they could even suggest routes that are "safer"
A great oxymoron to Google if you’re American is the “safety corridors” in your area. That’s the term for highway stretches that have a lot of fatalities.
They’re often indicated on highway signage, which I hate because you’d never intuit the meaning.
The roads that are "safety corridors", at least the ones in California, are rural two-lane, two-way undivided roads where people kill themselves trying to overtake cars that are going 1 MPH slower than them. The only way to redesign these is with K rails down the middle, but the ideal thing to do is mandate speed limiters in cars.
Is this actionable? Seems like noise without purpose, almost like showing off their data haul without there being anything a driver can change to be safer with this additional information.
Plus is this road-usage normalized? A freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic is going to have more crashes than a country road with a few vehicles an hour, but one crash a day on one Vs. multiple a day on the other could be required to indicate a more dangerous stretch in real-terms.
Wouldn't the thing the driver could do is pay more attention? Like it or not, but driver attention rises and falls along a drive.
Or, take a different route, probably eventually as presented by waze? Presumably they aren't just going to say "hey a lot of people die on this route. LOL good luck"
Maybe? A one second glance could put you in the mindset where you're ready to brake hard, or put some extra distance between you and the car in front, or choose to not search for the next song you want to hear, etc.
Most GPS and Map Apps have audible notices. Mine speaks up if there is debris or an accident ahead and it is not intrusive or wildly distracting.
For as long as these kinds of navigation utilities have been around, it seems like the implementation of non-intrusive or at the very least not-overly-distracting notifications have been figured out by the industry.
I built a demo of this at in a weekend for a hackathon and we even had a team member drive around with live updates during our presentation
Circling the building, the gauge for accident risk spiked as the team member drove past the poorly marked entrance to the parking garage of the building we were sitting in.
I'd say getting alerts about things like that would be fairly useful because most people don't drive at "maximum safety" all the time.
You can get people to slow down at least somewhat closer to the speed limit, get more attentive, etc. in hotspots for accidents.
Of course, that might just end up shifting the hotspots in some cases, but more often than not I imagine you'd find an environmental aspect to hotspots, like our poorly marker garage, or areas where sunlight can be blinding during commute hours.
Absolutely. Slow down, give more room, don't look at the directions, double-check your mirrors, etc. Nobody is on full alert for all of a 3 hour drive - but they certainly can be for a dozen 2-minute stretches where people often get into accidents.
At a higher level you could model a danger/anxiety/rage level for a segment of road taking in lots of signals like crashes, sudden stops, swerving, honking, speeding, etc.
Then you could offer an "avoid shit drivers" route option.
On my wish list is the ability to quickly drop a pin/mark a location/make a short audio recording while I'm driving. I might spot a pothole I want to report, or see an interesting landmark about which I'd like to search more, or want to note down the number plate of a misbehaving vehicle. When driving through unfamiliar roads/places, I've no way to track where and what I exactly I saw.
I remember a local news story where a woman described neighbors having complained to the city for years on end about a particularly dangerous intersection where someone recently died. She lamented how now that someone had died the city would have to do something to fix it.
And all I could think about was how the city was very literally not going to do a single damn thing about it.
There is room for such alerts in many ecosystems. For example, WordPress: There should be alerts for stale plugins, plugins that have recently changed authors, and other metrics for awful plugins. It could be condensed into a trust level rating from 1-5. That's only one example.
Interesting that this kind of alternative-route-calculation is now beginning to creep into car navigation. It is a well known (and unsolved) problem of pedestrian navigation for blind people. Often, the shortest path is not the best, period. Especially because dangerous or uncomfortable sections of your route will actually cost you more time then going the longer, but more safe alternative. However, its a question of what data you have. For blind pedestrians, the insight until now was always that we simply dont have the data to be able to calculate this reliably.
If more people used waze this would be a cool natural experiment: Does priming people to think a road is dangerous increase the number of crashes?
There are self-fulfilling prophecy type effects in psychology. I can see how making people more anxious could do that. Also could see how removing the more risk averse traffic from certain stretches of road, would make the traffic that remains more dangerous; fewer cars leading to greater speeds.
I feel like waze and other “people engineering” apps don’t fully grasp their responsibility in shaping human behaviors.
Around the place where I'm from the local government put one cross next to the road for each fatality. It was on a local single-lane road. And they used data that stretched decades back. There really was a lot of those, especially around every turn, and it did make people slow down. Ironically the crosses were eventually removed because they were deemed distracting. To be honest they kind of were, at night, because they were covered in slightly reflective paint so that you can still see them at night.
This is my street. 2 lanes each way with a turn lane, goes to 3 (no parking) during rush hour. The right lane is usually pretty empty so people go fast to get to the light. Left turners will be turning through 2 stopped lanes of traffic and not see the cars flying down the right lane. At least once a month there is an accident. Tried calling a few city departments to report it but couldn't find the right one.
This is a wonderful idea. A college friend of mine died in a single car accident. They interviewed a DOT officer who said something to effect of "Yeah, people drive way too fast on that street, no one anticipates the sharp corner, I guess nothing can be done." The first step to fixing any problem is acknowledging the problem exists.
My experience with Waze is that it is more likely to cause crashes, at least where I drive. It constantly recommended side street shortcuts with little to no time benefit.
These are streets where there is usually not room for two cars to pass in opposite directions and pedestrians, dogs and bikes are frequently going to be hazards.
Just figure out which drivers are correlated with a lot of deceleration from other drivers.
As a bonus this will catch all the "leaves close calls in their wake but never winds up at fault so they think they're a good driver" brand of bad drivers.
Question: what is the average delay in real-time traffic reporting in the app? In my area it always seems to lag at least 15 minutes behind actual conditions, which makes it less than helpful.
I would love if they had a rating per county of speed traps in case you’re driving alone on a long stretch at night and there is no one to report them.
I know about "speed check" ahead. This was in the wee hours and it is unlikely anyone would have "crowd sourced" it.
When I googled later though I found plenty of people complaining about this particular place in this small town where the police regularly trap "speeders". (FWIW, it's a 15 MPH school zone ... no kids at 6:00 in the morning but apparently that's not relevant.)
I use Waze every day. The police (speed trap) notifications usually appear in the same spot so it’s already the case if you remember where they were the day before.
One example I have is there is an intersection on my way home that Tesla maps (and Google maps) wants me to turn left at. The problem is that its a left turn without a signal, across 4 lanes of traffic with limited visibility. This is a recipe for crashes, and I've seen multiple crashes here. However, if you go 1/4mi out of your way then you go under a bridge and wind up at an on-ramp to the same road .. no left turn needed.
It took me a while to discover this route when I moved here. It would be nice if there was a "safer route detected, +1 minute" option presented to me.