I would assume there are similar routing apps used by professional truckers. Perhaps not free, but if $10/year gets your routes that semi’s can negotiate that might be a bargain vs your adrenaline and bile consumption otherwise.
The “ahead of me” feature would be darn nice. Not one I’ve ever seen, and would require you to have an established destination to define what “ahead” means in context. Which for most users isn’t a problem.
I personally use my nav system more like a zoomable paper map. I rarely have a destination set; instead I navigate myself to [wherever] with the map providing me the equivalent of local area knowledge about the various roads in the area that might lead to [wherever].
Me, too. That’s why I’m picky about the map style (colors, fonts, hierarchy of symbol and text label sizes, how topography and land cover are depicted, etc.). Apple Maps is my favorite; I use my iPhone, projected onto the car display via Bluetooth.
(Also, to use Apple Maps on a laptop, you just go to the DuckDuckGo browser site.)
The nav system is only as good as the map data it’s using. Google and Apple have cars driving around to keep their maps current, so using online maps probably gives you the most up-to-date info. My car is a little older and has a built-in nav system that uses a chip, and the chip has never been replacd with a newer one ($200 from the dealer, no thanks!) so a lot of new roads or changes wont be there (the chip also causes my whole entertainment system to restart occasionally when its cold so I have simply removed the chip, and just use my phone maps for the occasional nav need). Also, as I mentioned, the apps using crowdsourced traffic data will have even more real-time info.
Yeah - devices are NO substitute for common sense.
We were driving south once, and planning to visit a friend who lived east of 95 in Florida. I had looked at the directions earlier, and they said “exit, then turn left”. But just before the exit, I looked again, and they said “exit, then turn right”.
Assuming I had misremembered (and it’s entirely possible that going right would have led to something that took us toward the coast at some point), we followed the directions.
The next step? “in 500 feet, make a U turn”.
I’ve had Google do that to us several times.
Then there was the time we were trying to go to a hotel in, I think, Danbury, CT. Exit the highway (I-84, I believe). Go up this road. See hotel on left. Google maps said to sail on by the hotel around a big curve. Hmmm, maybe that was an employee entrance that I was not supposed to use?
Back onto the highway, eastbound. Go 2 exits. Turn around. Go BACK to the same exit. Pass the hotel again (this time, I turned into the hotel parking lot. It was not an employee entrance. Google Maps just fucked up bigly. Had I followed the directions, I’d have been doing a loop-de-loop until I ran out of fuel.
Back in the days of printed directions from MapQuest, they once directed me to drive a block past my destination, make a U turn, and then turn left into the hotel parking lot. I thought that seemed weird, and sure enough, when I got there it was quite possible to simply make a right turn to the hotel. I assume there must have been some error in their map data that led to the weirdness.
If you are navigating to a specific destination in Apple Maps, there’s a mode where you can ask for directions to fast food or gas or some other kind of establishment “on the way” to where you are going. A couple years ago we used it on a car trip; it didn’t work well as it kept giving us directions to places we were about to pass the exit for. Apparently it didn’t take speed of advance into account when making its decisions about when to alert you.
I don’t have an iPhone so I never used this feature myself, but I was the guy driving when we were having this problem.
That one IS strange. The only thing that makes any sense at all would be if the hotel’s exit there was set up to only allow making a right turn onto the road (i.e. some sort of curb or barrier to enforce that), though in that case you’d think turning left into it would be a problem also.
Now, if the directions and been "go past, make a U-turn, go back then turn RIGHT into the hotel, that makes a lot more sense. We were just in northern New Jersey last week and almost every place we went was set up like that; the main roads had no way to make left turns. Crazy-making but with their kind of traffic, it makes sense. Still, we’d have to go a mile or more out of our way to take advantage of a jug handle or whatever.
I’d love it. Not because I care , but because my husband would rather go to the restaurant 20 miles ahead than 1 mile back and he somehow expects me to know that the one Waze says is a mile away involves.
They definitely exist but I suspect they cost much more than $10/yr. If they were that cheap, trucks wouldn’t keep having their roofs sheared off when they go under one overpass or another near my house. Happens at least once a week. Even if they think the sign is lying about the height , those overpasses are either on the way to or on the parkway - where all commercial traffic is prohibited.
Getting to my parents after coming off the M6 motorway (and England) is a bit complicated to I use the say nav. However the Sat Nav tells me go right through the City of Preston making the journey outside of rush hour getting from one side of the city to the other takes about 45 minutes during which the ETA goes back about 30 min. I doubt you could do it in the estimated time even in the middle of the night.
The worst however is when my Sat Nav told me to turn into a field (image below). I don’t know if there was ever a road here but if there was it was a LONG time ago, well borfore the sat navs manufacture.
About 10 years ago in rural Missouri, I was advised by GPS to take an illegal U-turn, which caught me off-guard. It was about 5 in the morning. I scanned the area for cops, then took the advice, since I didn’t have a clue where I was.
Then that’s not just me and my dyslexia. A feature which also bugs me is that it may not tell me, once I take a given exit or turn, which lane I need to be in NEXT. I’ll be hitting the off-ramp, see the left and right lanes, both full of traffic, so unless I have managed to peek at the thing earlier I have to wait for it to tell me which lane to get into, which in some cases have proven to be too late.
I’ve looked at those, and they either have a large upfront cost ($799 for the RV-specific Garmin on Amazon), or want credit card numbers so they can helpfully renew you every year ($60-$80 for the one’s I’ve seen). I’m getting more leery of giving strangers on the other side of a webpage access to my accounts, and the current Apple/Google apps are so buggy, weird, and untrustworthy that I’m hesitant about the specialized versions. So for now I’m keeping with my advance planning with visual maps and even satellite/street* view. I’m not confident I’ll get anything worth the money, and don’t relish the inevitable battle to stop the charges. One of my “policies” is checking for the unsubscribe/cancel pages of any purchase website. I also like to call the help line before signing up, just to see how difficult it will be to handle edge-case problems. Few online businesses are passing that test nowadays, and I’m learning to live without them.
*Easy way to check suspect intersections, and ensure I can shoehorn myself into filling stations, etc. Also an easy way to look at proposed RV parks before pre-paying for a stay. Obvious to see from above how close they are, and if rigs are opposite parked. If each one is pointing the opposite of the next (pointing N/S/N/S, etc.) then the park is cheap and forcing clients to share pedestals (i.e. sharing water faucets/etc.). It’s amazing how much Google satellite view can help when choosing RV stops now.
I’m pretty patient with Google Maps and I indulge in the typical amount of “I’m going to disagree with you and then you can catch up with what I’m doing” BS. EXCEPT…
I hate it when it leads me through an area only to dump me out at a point where I have to turn left on a very busy road with no traffic light. If I had stayed on the road I was on, I would have had a traffic light and probably would have waited a minute to make a left turn. Instead, I’m in rush hour traffic waiting for two or three lanes to clear enough for me to make a dash across to the center turn lane. Maybe there’s a setting for “I PREFER TO TURN AT LIGHTS”?
There’s a route like that near us. If we are taking a Lyft or some such, and it’s in that direction, we have to tell the driver “DO NOT TURN HERE”. Going straight another quarter mile gets you to a traffic light onto the same road the “shortcut” (think of the hypotenuse on a right triangle) takes you to.
Coming back home, now, the hypotenuse is viable, since it’s 2 right turns. I usually don’t, when I’m driving, because that part is narrower and winding, and not well lit, but it’s certainly feasible.
A semi-related funny tale: About 18 years ago, we were driving north on US 15 through Pennsylvania. Well north of the Harrisburg area.
Yet every couple of miles, there would be a sign “Harrisburg, next right” (which I think led to a jug handle / U-turn sort of thing).
Why were they giving directions to a place you were driving AWAY from? Did they really assume people were that stupid? Or maybe they thought the drivers got befuddled after stopping at one of the numerous “gentlemen’s clubs” which also populated the road. I suppose it was, somehow, due to the fact that US-15 is (or used to be?) a fairly major north / south route for truckers.
When I lived in North Carolina, I routinely overrode my phone’s mapping app on the drive back from visiting my folks. It picked out what was technically the shortest route, which would have me spending the last segment on an annoying two-lane back road with a fairly low speed limit. I was happy to add a few extra minutes to the drive for the pleasure of sticking with highways and major roads.
I ran across this article and thought it might be of interest in this thread.
Food for thought from the article:
Support for the notion that people might improve with practice also comes from studies of what happens when people stop using their navigation skills. In a 2020 study published in Scientific Reports , for example, neuroscientists Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot of McGill University in Montreal recruited 50 young adults and questioned them about their lifetime experience of driving with GPS. Then they tested the volunteers in a virtual world that required them to navigate without GPS. The heaviest GPS users did worse, they found.
