Hopefully you all know what I’m talking about. Your navigation app routes you down a little residential side street that intersects with a busy, four-lane (i.e., two lanes in each direction) road, at an intersection with no traffic light, where you have to make the left turn. It’s rush hour, and there’s non-stop traffic in both directions on the main road. There’s not a chance that four different drivers are all going to coordinate to stop to let you turn. You sit there with your left turn signal on for five minutes, hoping against all odds for a break in traffic, before giving up, turning right, and going around the block.
Why are navigation apps still not smart enough to prevent this, by routing you up or down the side streets until you come to one that intersects with the main road at a traffic signal, so that you will have a dedicated chance to turn left? They collect real-time traffic data from all their users. Can’t they take into account how heavy traffic is? Does their map data not include info on which intersections have a traffic light or a stop sign, or how many lanes wide a road is? Or do the developers just not care enough to try to add this logic?
I’ve wondered the same. My gripe is that Google maps takes me to a busy 2 lane road (one lane each way) and i do eventually make the left turn. But I’m sure there’s a better route.
Apple Map is terrible. I’m not sure what they think they’re doing, but it’s just not useful.
Google Map is good. I use it on far trips. Best feature is you can pre-download maps so that you have good static data even when far from a signal.
Waze is great. It makes real-time data updates frequently. It knows how long turns take and won’t lead you to impossible situations. It doesn’t work so well out in the boonies. (Fun time driving slow when you’re the only Waze drive around and trick it into thinking there’s a traffic jam.)
If the heaviness of traffic were the only factor being taken into account, I might believe this. But giving up, making the right turn, and going around the block takes less time than the five minutes I sat there waiting to turn left.
Waze is the app that just did this to me today, inspiring me to create this post.
I’m genuinely surprised. I see Waze make “big picture” mistakes, like choosing between the freeway and surface streets. But I don’t see it make mistakes like impossible turns.
I guess that intersection is coded wrong. You can actually go to the website and make changes or add comments.
I think part of the problem is that it’s not literally impossible - you think it’s an impossible turn and I think it’s an impossible turn but I guarantee you that my husband doesn’t think so and would rather try to make that left than go around. A lot of those settings are based on personal preferences - my mother would use “avoid highways”, I know people who would use “avoid tolls” and my sister would use “minimize turns” if there was such a setting. No matter what they use as the default, some people won’t be happy with it.
But now I’m going to try to set mine to avoid difficult intersections - I learned something today!
Wow, I never knew about that! But I just checked, and it was already set to “always.”
It’s not coded wrong, in that a left turn is allowed. It’s not an impossible turn. I have no doubt I’d easily be able to make the turn at 3AM. It’s just that at 5PM, there’s so much traffic that there’s no way you’re getting let in, and it’s faster to go up or down the side streets until you get to one that intersects the main street at a traffic light.
Just poking around the Waze map editor now, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t store info on whether an intersection has a traffic light, a stop sign, or what, so that’s one problem. Also, it does have the capacity to store the number of lanes in each direction a road has, but this has to be manually entered by map editors, and the default is 1, which is what it’s (incorrectly) set to on the road I was trying to turn onto, so maybe that’s another problem.
There’s an intersection much like this, near our house. Basically the back road is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. We know enough to go along the bottom of the triangle, then make a left onto the main road, up the back of the triangle. Google Maps tries to send us up the hypotenuse. The left turn is essentially impossible except maybe at 2 AM.
On the rare occasion where we’ve needed to go that way in, say, a Lyft, we immediately inform the driver “here’s what it’s gonna tell you to do. Unless Lyft requires you to do that, do the other thing”.
Yes, do what you want… after a few moments, the navigation app will adapt to the new route you wanted. (Or, it will say at each succesive intersection…“Now make a U-turn” until you get mad and turn it off.)
Apple Maps is totally on par with Google Maps. They both work fine 95% of the time. Maybe you’re thinking it’s ten years ago when it did objectively suck, but those days are long over.
Yeah, I have this one turned on (and I do not have avoid difficult intersections on).
There are no toll roads in my regular driving areas at home, but I regularly travel to three different areas that have lots of toll roads, and I’m always in a rental car when I’m there. I don’t want to deal with that hassle, so I just have Waze set to avoid tolls.
The sort of issue raised in the OP is why I still employ my map-reading skills and don’t rely solely on the GPS when planning a trip. And it’s still not 100% I won’t encounter a problem but then that’s always been the case when navigating.
I’ve also had these programs try to steer me to a loading dock instead of the entrance of a large building. Amusing and annoying when someone comes out of the dock to give you actual directions to the front door so you know you’re not the only one.
I have a feeling that the way their model works is that it considers traffic for purposes of straight-line driving time, but it doesn’t really figure in as far as actually making that left is concerned. I’ve had Google Maps do that to me one too many times to believe otherwise. Once it realizes I’m going one direction on my street, it’ll direct me up and around the next street over, complete with a difficult left turn, instead of just recommending a u-turn and waiting at the stoplight.
I suspect it’s some kind of statistical goofiness- like on average, the hard left turn is faster, but the stoplight has a shorter maximum wait time, so the map app will pick the left turn, even though to people, the light seems like a better deal because you know you won’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes, while the left turn could be 0 seconds, or could be 5 minutes.
I use Apple Maps and it’s fine. Is actually more reliable on my iPhone than Google Maps, unsurprisingly. During active navigation it seems to favor intersections controlled with a traffic signal by default, and if it doesn’t, it at least shows which intersections have signals, which is a feature even Google didn’t have until a few years ago.
