I reject the suggested route for some specific routes that I am very familiar with, because I know the recommended route has heavy traffic at some times of day. I also reject the suggested route (involving a lot of city streets and secondary roads) to Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg in favour of a connection only using limited access highways.
As usually my wife drives and I navigate, we have developed set phrasing for this.
In all of these cases our car navigation system calculates its suggestion by least time, but I think it systematically overestimates the speed achievable on city streets and secondary roads.
In some cases, when we had time to spare, we deliberately set the car navigation to “least distance” and “avoid limited access highways”. In quite a few parts of Germany this leads to quite interesting and scenic routes.
My car’s factory nav system sucks, and I disagree with it all the time. There are two ways you can choose a route: shortest distance, or shortest time. If you choose shortest distance, it will route you through residential neighborhoods, through school zones, yada yada. Totally unusable in my city. On the other hand, if you set it for shortest time it doesn’t work because it doesn’t know the speed limits, so it will send you down a side road when two more blocks would get you on the freeway.
The firat road trip I went on after we got the vehicle, it navigated me right into the entrance of a farmer’s field after sending me down some country back road. I was trying to get to Lethbridge.
Also, Ford wanted a fortune for updates, so the database is old and often has no record of the road I’m actually on. I rarely even use it any more.
There are two circumstances in which I ignore the GPS directions:
It is taking me off the highway onto local roads to put me back on the highway 2-5 miles down, and save 5 minutes. I prefer not to drive on surface streets in an area I’m not familiar with.
It’s taking me through tiny neighborhoods where the speed limit is (or should be) 20 mph, but it seems to think that I will drive 40 there because when most commuters traverse those neighborhoods that’s what they are driving.
The driving time on my wife’s phone from our home to a frequent destination implies an average speed of 32 mph (5.8 mikes in 11 minutes). Most of the route is marked 20 mph, 25 mph or 30 mph. Literally 0.4 miles is signed 45. There are two stop signs on the route.
On my phone it shows 14 minutes. And takes me into a bigger arterial route that is posted 45 for most of the route. There are two traffic lights, but it’s correctly figured out that if I’m driving a narrow, winding country road with no sidewalk and lots of kids, runners, dogs and deer, I’m not going to be going 40.
I love navigation software, but it’s not perfect. You can often program it to minimize driving time or minimize distance (and presumably fuel consumption) or avoid tolls, but you can’t program it to make reasonable tradeoffs between the three. For instance, I often drive from Massachusetts to western New York. The navigation software always want to send me around Albany on I-87 but I almost always take I-90 through Albany instead. It saves about $3 on tolls but costs me only about one minute extra of driving on average, and the mileage is the same, for an implied savings of $180 for every extra hour of driving.
Ditto. It’s obviously outdated, and I refuse to pay the exorbitant fee to update it. (I think it should be free, but I digress.) Plus, it’s a PITA to add a destination to the address book. I do, however, have the map on the screen when driving a familiar route.
When I’m going somewhere unfamiliar, like a new restaurant in a nearby city, or a faraway hotel on a road trip, I will use Google Maps via Android Auto. I think it does a relatively good job. It also can discover construction delays or accidents. It’s had me avoid some time-consuming roadblocks.
If I know where I’m going, I have no need for a nav system.
I override the GPS quite regularly. It just doesn’t know the local situation. So visitors to our house regulary take the “short” way into our neighborhood not realizing that it’s actually going to take a lot more time and likely run into things that will slow them down.
I’ve mentioned here before a situation where a GPS directed me to get on a busy freeway on the left side and immediately take the next right exit. Even with no traffic it would be tricky. OTOH, all I have to do is continue on the road I’m on for a few blocks and get to the next turn even faster.
Several years back there was a bunch of family events somewhat a ways from us. I noticed we’d get back and wait and wait and wait before the others showed up. I asked what took them so long. They were taking a road with a ton of lights. That paralleled a freeway. I kept telling them to set their GPS to prefer freeways. Nope. I printed up directions on how to take the freeway. Nope. They just refused to ignore the GPS.
I’ve had two peculiar experiences with the nav system in my son’s car. He lives in Redmond, WA and I am somewhat familiar with his neighborhood. So when I had to drive to somewhere north of Redmond, I left his house the first instruction was to cross a somewhat trafficked street and I turned right instead intending to turn left at a traffic light a couple blocks later. Instead, when I got to the light, I was instructed to turn right! I don’t know where that would have left me, but not anywhere I was heading. I turned left anyway and the rest of the trip was uneventful.
The second time, I was driving my grandson to something called the Fifth Avenue Theater in Seattle. I entered Fifth Avenue Theater in the search function and it didn’t find it in the data base. So I got on the 520 bridge to Seattle (I did know how to do that) and once I was in the city I pulled off and entered a random address on Fifth Avenue figuring I would recognize the theater. It found Fifth Avenue in a completely different city, although I had specified Seattle. Finally with the help of my grandson and my vague memory of Seattle downtown, I was able to find Fifth Avenue and then the theater and let my grandson off there.
One thing I wish I could program the nav to do is leave off the directions out of my neighborhood. I know how to do that, and I know where the nearest highway onramps are. I’d love it to be silent until the point where I actually need the directions, but there seems to be no way to do that.
I have noticed that directions can change based on the time I’ve input for when I plan to leave - often I’ll get one set of directions if I say I plan to leave on weekday close to rush hour vs. the middle of the day on a weekend. I don’t always agree with those route changes if I know the area well.
I can’t complain about the walking directions Google Maps has given us in European cities though - it’s been pretty much flawless.
I used to work with the companies developing the first generation of digital road maps. We used to say “If you already know the way, the nav system wont help you.”
The roads were generally classified in a hierarchy as freeways, expressways that may have signals, arterials, collector roads, and neighborhood streets. The nav software generally favored funelling onto what were perceived to be faster roads and stay there as long as possible, and also factored in the overall route distance and distance from point A to point B as the crow flies. I am not sure what logic is used today.
Occasionally there would be errors in the data, such as a one-way street that had one road segment pointing the wrong direction, or a tiny missing segment - this would cause long detours for seemingly no reason. Or missing/wrong restrictions like ‘no left turn.’ In some cases conditions on the ground changed faster than the data could be updated.
These days with crowdsourced traffic data the nav systems are very smart and may be sending you what seems like the long way around, but in fact is routing you around some traffic snarl. Since you avoided the problem and it didn’t tell you what the problem was, you are left wondering about a bad navi route.
GPS software in my experience operates in a pretty rational manner when you ignore its directions. It may try to keep getting you to make turns to get on to its preferred route, but at some point it “gets” what you’re up to and recalculates a new route accordingly. Which I mention because it reminds me of an incident some time ago that I found amusing – but then, I’m easily amused!
There’s a freeway not far from here that used to end at a certain highway, where there was a final exit that you had to take because, like, there was no more road. That freeway has since been extended a considerable distance but my GPS doesn’t know that because it’s old and I’m too cheap to get map updates for it.
So one day I’m driving along and needed to take that freeway extension because I was headed up north. The cheerful Speaking Lady naturally informed me that I MUST exit here where the highway ends. When I failed to do so, the results were fun to behold. The GPS display, which normally shows the road that I’m on with a little arrow indicating my position on it, suddenly went blank. It still showed things like speed and direction, but as far as highways were concerned, it was as if the car had sprouted wings and was now flying over cornfields. I was imagining that I had blown the GPS’s little mind, and indeed the Speaking Lady – normally a cheerful source of directions and enthusiastic exhortations to remain on the current road – lapsed into what seemed to me a kind of shocked silence. There was no attempt to get me to adjust my route. I thought it was possible that the Speaking Lady had fainted.
Fortunately when I got close to my destination and took an exit onto a highway that the GPS recognized, the Speaking Lady came to life again and started giving directions, though I could have sworn that she sounded a bit shaky, as though she had just been through a terrible ordeal.
Many disagreements! My last trip from Duluth to Rochester Minnesota had two bizarre examples:
The best route is I35E south to downtown St. Paul, take the US 52 exit at I94 and stay in the left lane following the signs to join up to 52. Google maps has you take the US 52 exit, but instead of staying left, they want you to bear right to join I94 in the leftmost lane. You are to then move across three lanes of freeway-speed traffic only to exit to the right in half a mile to a different exit US 52. Not only is it impossible, it’s downright dangerous.
The next part of the trip is to follow US 52 for 70 miles - easy! On my last trip however, it had me go five miles south, then exit west on I494, go a few miles, then take I35E south to Owatonna. It is about 50 miles out of the way, and 50 minutes longer. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to take that route.
I’ve noticed that the navigation voice starts sounding a little irritated if the mere meatsack indulges in independent thought instead of simply doing what it’s told.
Google nav seems unclear about it being there and has a hard time routing there.
Which is fine by me. Locals know it and it is much faster than surface routes through the city (although it does get jam packed down there too sometimes…just not often).
So, when Google tells me to take the surface roads across the Loop I often ignore it. That’s fine, the challenge is telling an Uber/Lyft/Taxi driver to go the way I want instead of the way their nav tells them. Usually they listen…not always though.
Yeah I disagree with them. But mostly it’s because I don’t like a certain road.
For instance I70 heading up to the mountains on a Saturday in the winter will be a clusterfuck of rental cars with people that don’t know mountain driving. I’ll take the longer route that is traveled by locals thank you very much.
I do sometimes - generally because I have an uncommon preference that nav systems don’t take into account. Maybe I don’t like a particular street or the navigation will tell me to make a left at a particular intersection where that can be difficult. I know people who don’t like to stop. They don’t care about distance or time but they will jump on a highway for one exit to avoid a stop sign or choose a route with six stop signs to avoid one light. They disagree a lot - although sometimes they change their mind when they ignore Waze and get stuck in a jam.
I ignore it when it tries to drive me straight into a wall.
OK, it involves Lower Michigan Avenue, in Chicago, but it routed me onto Lower Michigan Avenue successfully, so it should have known where I was. It had me go north on Michigan and continued to route me north at Grand Avenue which, um, is a wall on the lower level. Now, the GPS gets futzed up all the time on the lower levels, so I should expect it, but it routed me there! It “knew” I was on lower Michigan, yet for some reason warped me up to upper Michigan instead of correcting the GPS like it does in other cases.
I also giggle at the arbitrary and even capricious “alternate routes” it gives me while I’m driving that make absolutely no sense. It’ like it’s programmed to nag you ever so often with an alternate routes. Like there will be one to go a block over, go a block up, and then go the block back for an ETA of “about the same.” Why? Or the alternate route that shows up on a long trip that is “38 minutes longer.” Again, why?
