An interesting "red but no traffic" phenomenon is in Iceland, with roads which are next to scenery viewing points. The roads are mostly empty in this country, but everyone must've slowed down when they saw the breathtaking scenery, and would pull into the viewing point's parking spot to stop and take pictures. On Google Maps these areas were marked red.
On another navigation related topic; I was using Waze in a high-traffic city, where even the alternate routes have a lot of traffic. I was thinking, it surely would be possible for Waze to look back along my route and calculate which route would have been better for me.
E.g. if I drove from A via B, C, D, E towards Z, and there was an alternate route A-B-F-G-E-Z, and the route branches out at B (you can either take path B-C-D-E or path B-F-G-E), the app could find a car that was near me at point B, and went to F later on. It would then know the time I would have needed to drive from B to F. This ghost car doesn't need to go all the way to E, if it turned off at F, the app could find another car, one which at that point was at point F and later on drove to G (or better, E), and then see how much time they took. And so on for each segment of my alternate route...
So I'm stuck in a traffic jam, and google maps is telling me I can take an alternate route to avoid it and save 25 minutes vs waiting in the traffic jam. Something that occurs to me as I sit in this traffic...
what portion of all the other driver's around me also looking at google maps? Is Google Maps telling them to take the same alternate route as me? Are they all going to do it? If they all do it, does the alternate route (which likely can't handle as much traffic as the original route) just became as jammed as waiting in traffic? Or even worse, if they're all going to do what google maps says, would I in fact be much better off ignoring it and sticking to the original route?
It's hard to tell what's imagination/selection bias, but following google maps traffic-jam-avoidance suggestions has seemed disastrous enough to me enough times that I mostly just stick to the original route now. (Of course, one could also imagine using one's own route knowledge to pick an alternate route of one's own without google maps...)
I suppose google maps could be smart enough to tell half the people to go one way and half the other... I kind of doubt it is, but one could imagine a computerized route direction system which, if enough driver's had it, could actually maximize efficiency by sending different drivers different routes intentionally... I'm not holding my breath for it.
Two weeks ago in Atlanta, I was dropping my wife to the Airport. Atlanta traffic was doing it's thing (not moving). Google said it found alternate route that will save 7 minutes. I was like meh. Then it said 10 minutes so I took the turn. I don't know how many people did the same but I ended up spending half an hour extra in some internal road and half of it was being stuck in a right turn lane that rejoined the original highway I was on. So if I had kept on the slow moving highway I would have definitely reached much earlier than the alternate route. Bottom line is that the 'Save time' works only when the alternate route is truly alternate and not just a detour and rejoin the same highway as you will get stuck on the ramp while joining back.
Well the other route presumably has a significant throughput. If 1000 car/min are in traffic, and the side-road has a 200 car/min capacity, the first 20% of people to leave the main road will experience no additional traffic.
Now, let's say that the 200 car/min turns to a bottleneck of 100 car/min if it's overwhelmed 10 mins downstream of the turnoff. If google routes >200 car/min to the turnoff, there will eventually be a significant traffic jam: cars will pile up at the bottleneck, and even if waze stops routing to the turnoff at that point, the jam would still travel upwards like a pressure wave until it hits the turnoff.
I'd have a hard time believing it's possible for waze to know beforehand what those throughputs are, so some situations like this must occur.
These situations absolutely occur. Something like this happened to me in Alexandria, VA, trying to cross the Woodrow Wilson bridge into MD. I-495 was slow across the bridge. Waze re-directed me off the interstate into residential side streets, along with thousands of other travelers. The side-streets were every bit as jammed as the highway. It took me 3 hours to disentangle myself from that mess. Was it faster than staying on the highway? No idea, but 3 hours to cover 5 miles is terrible - the app should have just said "You're fucked, go home and try again tomorrow." instead of constantly telling me "oh hey, try this other side street, it'll save you 45 minutes!"
My third hand information frmo a coworker who is friends with people on the maps team is that some percentage of people will get routed into the traffic, and some percentage will get routed to alternate routes, of which there may be a few. Google appears to take a rather active stance on increasing total traffic flow, even at the expense of giving some number of drivers suboptimal routes.
On average, these are the best routes. There's some chance you'll be that guy routed into traffic today, only to enjoy the faster detour the next ten times. Decreasing total time in traffic for all participants is optimal on the long run for every single participant.
Take the toy example illustrating that paradox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox#Mathematica... ) and an enlightened Google maps may do the altruistic thing of telling half of the drivers to stick on the upper route and half of the drivers to stick to the bottom route, but then some 3rd-party app will come along with the "shortcut" down the middle.
Maybe when all/most traffic is self-driving cars they could somehow be regulated to all use the same coordinated routing system without "cheating"... probably not.
Presumably, this alternate route won't save you 25 minutes by the time you and others reroute. However if it saves you 10 minutes and reduces the delay on the original route by 10 minutes since there are now fewer cars idling, then everyone is better off.
Consider another example. Google suggests an alternate route that will presumably save 15 minutes.
Let's say enough cars take the suggestion to slow down that route by 10 minutes and speed up this one by 10 minutes. Even if you end up saving five minutes relative to the original estimate, you'd have saved ten minutes staying put.
It is a point of contention if Google should optimize for saving time for the individual user, (using data only available to that user), or for that user (but using routing information of other google users), or for all users on average (but potentially to the detriment of some users to give other users a bigger advantage), or for the public on average (ie. routing cars to reduce traffic, but possibly putting google users at a disadvantage compared to non-google users).
Various cities round the world have different optimization goals as they try out different approaches.
I would say obviously the answer is that users paying for premium levels of service should get faster routes, isn't that how this sort of thing is done?
This happens on NY 73, which is a road in the Adirondack High Peaks region between the highway and Lake Placid. It’s legit — even though cars are parked, you still need to slow down!
I usually avoid Google maps for traveling in areas that I don’t know. It takes you off on stupid routes that save marginal time (if any) too much. Waze is good for interstate travel, but IMO Apple is better for giving you the “right”, low drama route.
This is my common complaint with Waze and most driving apps - they optimize for "least time," not "least anguish". I would almost always prefer to spend an extra 5 minutes on my "normal" route (that I have on auto-pilot) instead of saving that 5 minutes by taking confusingly-named side-streets with lots of left turns onto other busy side-streets. I don't know if Apple Maps really gets this any better to be honest.
This is an understated problem. Google used to regularly take me through a route that involves a left turn in a major road and multiple crossings where cross traffic won’t stop. Literally two blocks from the suggested left turn is a left turn arrow signal which also avoids the dangerous crossings.
It’s both dangerous and anxiety inducing and doesn’t save time either.
This problem baffles me because all that has to be done to correct it is increase the estimated time of arrival penalty for making an unprotected left turn so that the routing algorithm doesn't mistakenly think it's faster. Ditto for U-turns, which Google constantly suggests (rather than turning onto a side street and U-turning there or going around the block) even when they are impossible (median in the way), dangerous (high speed road) or illegal.
That's weird. Google maps seems to prefer to direct me on a kilometres long detour than to take a simple u-turn into an empty driveway. They do seem to have rules about u-turns, they just don't make sense.
One time I had TomTom accidentally switch itself on in my bag on the floor, set to Homer Simpson's voice and trying to redirect me to home.
As I got further and further away the "turn left here" and "turn right here" directions got more and more frequent, until eventually he just started repeating "turn around where possible" until I was able to find somewhere reasonable to stop and turn it off.
Roundabouts have the unfortunate property of smoothing throughput from a sequence of chunks and gaps to a constant dribble. That's fine on limited access roads with overpasses and parallel feeder roads for local traffic or where overall throughput is always low enough to still comfortably cut in from a lower rank junction. On everything in between (enough traffic to make turning difficult, but still having direct junctions with access roads) you are better off with the occasional traffic light that will as a side effect serve gaps to meet rank junctions downstream.
I hate roundabouts. I live in France, and we have them everywhere. They're a huge clusterfuck that does not win any time, and when misused can be a lot more dangerous than a properly planned intersection. Of all the accidents I've driven past on my daily drives, all of them happened on roundabouts. I hate them.
> Of all the accidents I've driven past on my daily drives, all of them happened on roundabouts.
In localities with few/no roundabouts, the vast majority of accidents still happen at intersections. Intersections of roads are the most prone to accidents (for fairly obvious reasons), with or without roundabouts.
I believe there is research showing roundabouts are actually quite a bit safer in general, but it's possible it depends on various things. But anyway, accidents happen mostly where two roads intersect, either way.
> People, bikes, buses, trucks: all face difficulty or death in their presence.
Roundabouts make my bicycle commute way faster. This in The Netherlands where we cycle a lot. Difficulty or death is entirely incorrect. Suggest to compare the designs across countries, maybe there's a huge difference in the design?
I think the issue comes when people try to circumvent the give-way priority - which gets worse when there are multiple lanes and multiple exits.
It certainly seems to be a people problem rather than a roundabout deign issue from my experience?
People trying to "beat" people out onto the roundabout rather than giving way, people not using proper lane discipline and squeezing/cutting into other lanes etc..
> They're a huge clusterfuck that does not win any time
Research shows the opposite. They can handle more traffic within a given timeframe. The bit about accidents seems strange. Not sure why you'd think that. I'm wondering if your roundabouts have some kind of design flaw.
Well, having driven on France on holidays, the problem seems to be with the driving culture. The roundabouts are very busy, and likely as a result drivers dart out in the shortest possible gaps in traffic. If you decide to play it safe, then the backed up traffic behind you starts honking at you, increasing the pressure and pushing you to make a bad decision. I found it very stressful indeed! (Perhaps all of France is not like this).
The Place Charles de Gaulle Étoile (Arc de Triomphe) in Paris is a gigantic roundabout, with the peculiar feature that traffic entering the system has priority ; traffic already on the roundabout must yield. This would lead to perpetual gridlock were there no traffic lights controlling access to the roundabout. This kind of junction used to be common in cities.
Out in the countryside roundabouts in France operate in the "normal" way : approaching traffic yields to traffic already in the system, with the usual triangular "yield" sign making priority clear.
It's possible that your experience of French roundabouts is related to driver confusion between these two systems.
The research I've seen suggest roundabouts do indeed cause accidents, but they're always low-speed accidents where people don't die. Intersections on the other hand are more likely to cause deaths because speeds can be much greater.
They take space for anything at reasonable size I'd guess.
Strangely enough though it's one of the few things I miss about the city I grew up in (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) - lots of outdoor art and sculptures because they had lots of very large roundabouts (check Google images to see what I mean about the outdoor art).
America cities have too many oversized streets and major intersections. Keep the streets small and you don't need as many intersections and you can invest more in the ones you have. This is what they do in the Netherlands.
Wisconsin has become one giant series of roundabouts across the state over the past decade; they’re everywhere after new construction and being retrofitted whenever the opportunity arises. Sometimes 2 and 3 roundabouts connected at times.
> In cities, they are death traps for pedestrians and cyclists.
I haven't experienced that for the many roundabouts we have in The Netherlands. Throughput is higher (can easily be measured), plus waiting time is lower thanks to roundabouts.
Not exactly sure what you mean with "burbs" though it doesn't matter as they're heavily used in cities here.
I ride my bike through rotaries (as we call them here in Mass.) all the time. It's not that hard. It is advisable to try to ride as fast as possible, but the key is to signal clearly all movements in and out of the lane and the circle.
The problem is that it would be mostly useless, because it'd be buried in a menu somewhere where you can't easily change it while driving.
The avoiding tolls thing is absolutely terrible that way. Thankfully, they finally put in a new feature where it shows you alternate routes, with and without tolls, and tells you if they do or don't have tolls. It took years for this to come about even though I had requested it many times, and it's plainly obviously needed. But before this, it was all-or-nothing, and it wasn't easy to change on the fly, and having it on was bad because it would frequently try to route me onto an expensive toll lane even though there was zero time savings, but for other routes a toll road was absolutely necessary.
They should have it weight left turns higher (as in worse) so that routes tend to avoid them. When I drive to work, I can take my normal exit, and only take right turns, or if I miss it, I can take the next exit, but there's a terrible left turn there with a very long light. Google Maps consistently says "1 minute longer" for this route: BS. It might be about the same if you happen to catch the light, otherwise it's 5 minutes longer. I feel like their algorithm really doesn't take this into account well.
I would love it if these apps gave an option for easiest drive. Both Apple and Google tell me to take a left turn by my house onto a busy road when its actually quicker to go the other way and just loop around. In fact, if they just had an “avoid unprotected left turns” option that’d be fantastic.
I had a dedicated GPS a decade ago (I don't remember what brand) that had route options for Fastest, Shortest or Simplest that were easy to pick when you were first putting in the address. With few exceptions, simplest was usually the best option, especially if driving in an unfamiliar area. I think it basically tried to minimize turns or number of different roads. That would be a nice thing to see on Google Maps.
Yes this is one thing that frustrates me about Google's navigation. Often it will take you off the main road through difficult and narrow side roads in order to save 2 mins. When I'm in an unfamiliar area I would rather save the stress and sit in traffic for those two minutes.
I will risk writing that you had Navigon or TomTom. At least in Europe those were the two main choices.
I often use Navigon I keep in a (very old) iPhone, it has a fantastic feature that you can download the maps for countries. I like it better for long distance driving than Google Maps.
There's a regular drive I make. I can either hop on the freeway and it takes 1hr 4min, or I can take backroads and it takes 1hr 2min.
The backroads also has a 25% or so chance of getting stopped by a train. Big massive transcontinental train connecting the biggest port complex in the US to the rest of the country. Takes about ten minutes. Last time I hit the train, as it was almost done, a train came the other way.
Haven't taken that route since, despite the fact that it saves two minutes, sometimes more if there's traffic on the freeway. It's not a good value proposition.
> with Waze and most driving apps - they optimize for "least time," not "least anguish"
It's my impression that Google Maps does the latter; Waze is known for taking wild routes that are nominally faster. I'm not sure that I see a basis for complaint, as they're just offering a choice of different route objectives to optimize for (I know people who explicitly use Waze because they prefer its aggressive optimization to Maps). I suppose a toggle would be nice though.
I travel to new cities often and usually rent a car from the airport. In most cities around the world, there is dedicated signage pointing out the access to the airport on every major approach it. I would say half the time Google wants to take me on a different route on some back road that is not meant to be the public access to the airport, which creates the extra mental overhead of having to ignore the gigantic "AIRPORT - EXIT HERE" signs all along the way. It even does this at SFO, presumably an airport that the very people who work on Google Maps use, where it always wants to exit the interstate one exit before the sign for the airport and take city streets instead. The worst experience I've had of this was in Denver, where it directed me onto a country road that circled the airport property and then ended at a temporary road closure. That is, Google's "5 seconds faster than the main, signed route" optimization wasn't even an actual route to the airport!
My favorite example of this was in NYC heading to Citi Field for a Mets game. Google Maps guides you past the exit, has you make a u-turn by getting off at the next exit (which is really unusual) and get you trapped on some ramp for an extra 20m.
It's not a new problem by any means - UPS trucks avoid left turns thanks to their navigation algorithm for more than a decade and they were trying to do it since the 1970s.
Sorry for the minor comment but I noticed this part: "side-streets with lots of left turns onto other busy side-streets"
Now I live in Europe, presumably you live in the US (sorry if that's wrong). Is there any particular difficulties with doing left turns compared to right turns where you live?
Biggest difference I found moving from Europe was that you can make a right turn on a red traffic in many states in the US (but not in New york city apparently!). You have to treat it like a stop sign and yield to any traffic on the road you're joining. Ends making a journey of rights turns much fast than one with left turns, particularly in rush hour
Left turns cross all four lanes of traffic involved in an intersection while right turns involve two, so if either street is busy you have to wait longer for a gap.
Roads can be very wide in the US, it is not uncommon for cities to have 6 or 8 lane roads at-grade (i.e. not expressways). So when turning left, one must turn across 3 or 4 lanes of oncoming traffic, instead of just one as when turning right.
Yes, I'm in the US. Left turns have to cross oncoming traffic so you have to monitor both directions. This is especially stressful if {both roads are busy, there's weather/dark, you don't know the roads}.
I recently tried walking directions to JapanTown in SF on both Google Maps and Apple Maps.
gMaps took us to the restaurant on the shortest path - straight through the heart of Tenderloin. My girlfriend was sketched out as heck and almost made us take an Uber.
On our way back from the restaurant, we used Apple Maps. It took us on what looked like a longer route but lo and behold, it took a wiiiide berth around the Tenderloin. We saw not a single sketchy thing on our entire night time walk.
Don’t know if it was a coincidence or Apple Maps really has an “avoid seedy areas” model. The route was way simpler at least. 2 or 3 turns compared to gMaps’s 15
And grid geometry means Apple Maps was only 2min slower. But way nicer and easier to navigate.
No need for explicit "avoid seedy areas" model. Just look where people prefer to walk (esp. people with iphones), and favor those streets in your algorithm.
Next thing you know, (SF) City politicians are up in arms about why Apple is "blackballing" Tenderloin, and rake up past issues such as red-lining, ghettos, etc.
> On our way back from the restaurant, we used Apple Maps. It took us on what looked like a longer route but lo and behold, it took a wiiiide berth around the Tenderloin. We saw not a single sketchy thing on our entire night time walk.
Microsoft patented such an "avoid ghetto" idea year ago, but people got mad and called it racist:
I'm right there with you. A model based on race would be racist. The issue is that in urban areas, crime rate is often a good proxy for race (particularly when looking at, say, muggings or carjackings rather than white-collar crime). I consider that irrelevant, but as the two articles I linked show, the "disparate impact" type folks don't care about which stat is being used.
I've visited and I wouldn't say that is true. There is all kinds of seedy. There are white/skinny seedy people walking rats, kinda freaky. But taking the downtown bus gave equal race representation when someone started a fight with me over there bag's right to occupy my seat. The Asian gangs robbing/hitting people on the bart I was on showed a different side of seedy. The uniquely San Fran treat was someone asking my opinion on my beat poetry they wrote around race struggles. After commenting positively (just to be nice) said Poet offered to sell and when refused when on racial rant and become very aggressive.
It's a diverse place of seed and rich. It's a very future feeling place. The experience made me think this is a slice of what the future will look like. It's kinda has this dystopian gothic novel feel. The mini subways (barts) are automated and cool and look like they are in the future but look like they are falling apart too. You get this weird post apocalyptic feeling of a future that has come and gone but hasn't reached you yet
The Bart is designed to look automated, but it's one of the least automated transit systems around - There's a human driver on each train, station agents to watch the doors, and it's only the fact that they have nice recordings that makes it feel impersonal and automated.
They should get some nice recordings here in DC for the Metro system. They usually just have the drivers making announcements, and half the time I can't understand a word they said.
The Bart is designed to look automated, but it's one of the least automated transit systems around - There's a human driver on each train, station agents to watch the doors, and it's only the fact that they have nice recordings that makes it feel impersonal and automated.
Yeah, no. BART doesn't have station agents watching the doors, and human drivers are a common occurrence on pretty much every subway system in the world.
>I usually avoid Google maps for traveling in areas that I don’t know. It takes you off on stupid routes that save marginal time (if any) too much.
We relied on GMaps on a recent (my first ever) visit to Malta, and it took us through some pretty dodgy, steep and narrow, local roads on our way in.
We didn't know of this GMaps' preference of, erm, interesting routes, so we figured that's just how Malta is. A few days later and, of course, we learn there's a perfectly normal, pleasant route that took us there in as little time as the dodgy one...
So a theory I've had for a bit now... Google maps doesn't optimize for ease of travel, or time, or anything like that - it optimizes for engagement, like every other Google product. And how would you do that with a maps product? By making routes too complicated to memorize, too specialized (back streets, etc) to generalize, and then changing things up often to prevent a route from becoming second nature anyways.
Which feels like a lot of what people complain Google Maps does...
Sounds funny, but your theory is false. I use GMaps every day to drive to and from work, with a very simple route that's almost all on an interstate highway. Almost every day, it gives me the exact same route (which is so simple I really don't need GPS navigation at all for it). Sometimes, it gives me a different route because of an accident, traffic jam, construction delay, etc., which is why I use GPS all the time, but I see absolutely nothing to indicate that Google intentionally makes my route more complicated than it needs to be. (And yes, these delays are real: this road is under a lot of construction at the moment, and it frequently has crashes and traffic jams in places.)
... especially if they can bring you by some companies who have paid for ads on Maps. Where I used to live, in a grid city, Maps would take drivers down one single street whose only discerning feature from those 2 streets north or south (alternating one-ways) was that it could say "Turn left at the Pizza Hut".
Gm definitely does not taken elivation into account. If you live in a hilly country you will want to avoid alternative routes that seem shorter but are really elevation changes.
There is a popular road in a relatively rural part of the SF Bay area for bicycling and on the weekends it appears to have traffic due to the slower speed of the numerous cyclists. There isn't actually more traffic. Google then sends cars on a winding narrow hilly alternate route.
Maps starts reading pedestrians in downtown SF as traffic during road closures for e.g. stadium events, and tries to direct cars along jammed and even closed roads. Too many times have I been stuck less than a mile from a destination for more than an hour, sometimes even two.
I have a route I take, and let's say I split it up with A-B-C. now Google Maps tells me that AB-BC takes an hour, but AB'-BC' is 15 minutes faster.
It usually turns out that the time delay is on the later leg. So I could take AB or AB', it doesn't matter, and then BC' is the faster choice later on.
I wish Google Maps wouldn't show me AB', because it's misleading. At best it should say AB' is the same ETA. But clicking on it means that some route near the end of my drive is now different, it doesn't actually save me time for my current divergence. It's misleading.
The key assumption there is that your alternate-self ghost-car is following the flow of traffic. Which might be true if the route was a highway; but what if it was, say, a shopping district? (“The other you would have gotten here slower, because they’d have been lured into a Starbucks drive-through on the way.”) Or what if they’re a new driver/have a flat tire, and so are driving slower than the speed limit with cars honking behind them? (“Your other self would have been a teenager who hesitated too long on a left turn at an intersection, and so had to wait an extra light cycle.”)
I used to work for a mapping & navigation company that offered a traffic API service. It worked by using anonymized cell phone data to predict traffic patterns. I once heard a story that during peak hour, every five minutes or so the jams on a highway would magically disappear then reappear. After some head scratching, turns out there is a train track inbetween the lanes of the highway full of high speed commuters that would cancel out the stationary car commuters.
You can measure peak acceleration--cars accelerate much faster than buses or trains--or whether you're connected to headphones (not a head-unit). Use of headphones by drivers is illegal in most places.
As for express vs. regular lanes, express-lane cars will have much different distributions than regular-lane cars. Use something like KNN where the distance metric is a weighted sum of Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between speed distributions and K-S between acceleration distributions (each vehicle is one unit with a distribution of speeds and accelerations).
I’m pretty sure this is rarely enforced in most states in the US. My father frequently drives across the US and always takes his calls with earbuds because the speakers aren’t very good.
I do it with one earbud in because I find the quality of speaker audio terrible, forcing me to concentrate harder on it to discern what’s being said.
Single ear devices are usually legal where earbuds in both ears is not. Maintaining situational awareness seems to be the rule. If course, I'm essentially deaf in on ear, so being legal isn't any safer.
I tend to use the car speakers or simply refuse all incoming calls while driving.
Definitely the best course of action. Even just talking on the phone is very distracting. No way someone can have a full conversation going and still be giving the same attention to driving.
I don't know what a free lane vs an express lane is, but for the "that", I can imagine that a cluster of hundreds of phones moving at exactly the same speed in the vicinity of a train track until they reach the next station would be a reasonable indicator that the were in a train. The preexisting phones in that area would not show the property of moving at the same speed at the same time, and it also kind of stands out that they're still doing 15-30km/h (or however bad traffic may be) while the newcomer phones all rush through at 140km/h (85miles/h).
Bonus points if those clients all connect from the same IP address (range). That would be the train WiFi.
Express lanes can be separated lanes with fewer exits that allow you to go faster because of fewer lane changes. Chicago (and I'm sure many other cities) have these. They're separated by concrete barriers and only have exits every couple miles, so you'll be right next to super slow traffic while you're doing 20+ MPH more than the "free" lanes. In Chicago, you don't have to pay to go in them, but here in LA, they have High Occupancy Vehicle lanes that you can use if you have more than one person in the, OR if you pay for using the lane with the FastPass you use for paying for other tolls.
You could collect all data from that route and then if you find that the average velocities of the phones fall neatly into two sets of values, then the algorithm should interpret this as one set of phones having an alternate method of travel, something other than the road.
I used to work for a map company, and phone traces were immediately broken into smaller chunks to anonymize them. Using location history isn’t viable when all you have a collection of short traces.
This should be simple if there’s a beacon or Wifi on the train. Train goers will have that beacon in range on each location update while car goers will not (or may briefly if in-range of the train)
Not really that easy with just IMU sensors, I’d assume ?
I did one project in school (albeit a simple SVM based model) to classify walking vs running (and so on) and ambiguity was still there. Stationary vs. Walking was easy to draw a hyper plane in between, not Running.
I still find it a difficult problem to get into, after 5 years. Perhaps ANN models might work better? Although my heart is still at Hidden MM states...
I have it, not only the code but labelled dataset I created with an arduino, first, and then iPhone. It’s been a private repository forever, but thanks! I’ll make it public and Edit post the link down here.
A similar problem happens during unusual big snowfalls in the country or in the mountains. The primary roads turn red because the cars are going really slow cz there is 50cm of snow. So maps redirects you to secondary roads, where there is nobody and even more snow.
We got hit by a surprise blizzard once (driving from North Dakota to Minnesota, where it went from no trace of snow to blizzard in about 20 minutes of driving). Our car couldn't really make it up any road that wasn't well plowed.
I was trying to navigate to a hotel because I knew we couldn't make it back in this weather, but all the closest hotels weren't on main roads. I was desperately trying to figure out a way to tell Google "prefer main roads" so we could find a hotel that was several miles further away if that meant sticking to safer roads.
I thought a lot about how a feature like that could save lives in an emergency. Does this already exist anywhere?
Of course, any basic offline routing application that doesn't have live traffic feed. Something like Osmand for example.
It's an interesting example of over-optimisation causing unforeseen effects. Perhaps better to rely on naive basic routing combined with external traffic condition prompts instead.
I wonder if you could quickly save offline maps for the area you're in and then kill the GSM connection. So you could still navigate but without traffic information.
Yes you can do this with google maps - have been able for a couple of years. Hit the hamburger then ‘offline maps’ and it will download your geographic region. Great for international travel as it will still pathfind
It does exist. Download offline maps for the region you are in. Then turn off the Internet connection. Ask Google Maps to do the routing while offline.
Offline routing works? Every time that I've previously tried offline routing on downloaded maps it spun for a while and then gave up with a connection error. I was under the impression that the only point of offline maps was for looking up locations, not for navigating to them.
Get Here WeGo, Nokia's maps app. You can download whole states/countries to use offline (it's all vector data so it's not too huge), and traffic data is optional. I've been using it since the Nokia N9 days.
Took a 9+ hour drive today, started offline and Google was able to navigate and plot it just fine. We had downloaded the maps for the area ahead of time.
Guessing maybe it outpaces what is downloaded when it starts having problems?
presumably your intended existing route was already on the main roads? while in navigation mode you can hit the search icon (magnifying glass) to search along the existing route. it won't be perfect but it should work for your use case.
This happened to me once. I was driving to a client while it was snowing. Google Maps told me that there was a faster, less busy way, and avoid the highway.
Yeah it was less busy -- because the locals knew damn well to avoid the crazy slick small roads. At some point, I lost control of the car and skidded off the road. Thankfully I didn't end in the ditch.
Is it your opinion that Google (TOS aside) would be legally responsible for accidents that result from hazards on routes that Google directs propel to?
Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity. In addition to the "red but no traffic" problems highlighted by others I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes". Additionally:
* I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit.
* There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.
* Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1]
Edit:
[1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
>There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.
Woah, I've never heard anyone else mention this problem. It sounds strange having it said "out loud" because I thought it was just a weird personal quirk/irritation of mine.
I have always wished there was a route option of "easy mode driving," or "no pressure route."
Often the "quickest" route google maps shows me is one that has some sort of difficult turn across multiple lanes going the other direction into a "suicide lane" or what have you.
Either that, of some sort of merging is necessary where you're basically at the mercy of other drivers letting you in (especially tough if you're not an aggressive driver like myself).
Honestly, some maneuvers give me a lot of anxiety, like when I'm on a very busy two lane road (no middle lane) and google is telling me to turn left, so I have to sit there with my blinker on feeling terrible for pissing off all the drivers that are now pilling up behind me, while I anxiously wait for an opening.
Unless Im late for something important, I'd gladly go 5 minutes or more out of my way not to experience that kind of driving pressure/social anxiety. I have a moderate anxiety disorder so I know this might not be normal.
But you're absolutely right! I suppose it does in fact boil down to just having a route option with "no left turns" -- I had never thought of it that way. That's such a simple way to solve 95% of the problem.
----
Edit: a left turn lane, with a green left turn light is totally fine.
Edit 2:
For the handful of caring but misguided people scrutinizing my aversion for left turns:
>Federal data have shown that 53.1 percent of crossing-path crashes involve left turns, but only 5.7 percent involve right turns.
sauce: 2001 - Analysis of Crossing Path Crashes - NHTSA
Not too surprising if we think about it. At a significant number of unprotected lefts at busy intersections, you basically have to semi-aggressively pull out in front of oncoming traffic and rely on them to slow down for you in order to get through in a reasonable time. It's tough to automate that in a safe way. Especially if it involves fuzzy value judgements about whether those cars seem like they'll probably slow down for you.
I've mostly given up on unprotected left turns onto huge streets (El Camino Real in my part of the Bay Area).
I'd rather turn right and then take the next U-turn to get back to where I want to go.
It reduces my social anxiety of people piling up behind me as I want to turn left, and it reduces my perception (right or wrong) of risk. When I turn left, I need to alternate looking left and right. When I turn right, I mostly only need to look to my left (unless there is a biker going opposite traffic, which has happened to me!).
Per this list of US state bicycle laws [0] (I don't have easy access to bicycle laws in other countries, so I can't attest to them), I don't see a single state that requires cyclists to ride against traffic. To the contrary, every single state (barring Illinois, which suggests that bicycles be treated as traffic but leaves direct enforcement up to individual municipalities) appears to require that cycles travel with traffic (see all references to "as far to the right as possible" in the "Where To Ride" sections).
I don't have anxiety about busy turns or cars behind me, but I still roll my eyes at elective left turns and stop signs, because I can't see how they're expected to save time. I would believe it could work out if you do rolling stops, accelerate hard between stop signs, and perform left turns with narrow margins. But if you're not driving that way, many "shortcuts" seem utterly counterproductive.
Maybe it's vey niche, but I'd like an "avoid traffic lights" setting. On common routes for me you'd often be a lot faster by going 1 minute out of your way to prevent a potential 5 minute wait at a traffic light during rush hour.
You do, and you should feel that way for a left turn.
This is a behavior we normalize in a driving society. Being assertive as you turn left does nothing to reduce the impact of another car hitting you at 45 miles an hour (or even faster in more rural places).
>A study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) shows that turning left is one of the primary causes of automobile collisions. 61 percent of crashes that occur while turning or crossing an intersection involve left turns, as opposed to just 3.1 percent that involve right turns.
There's a line to be walked between his decently extreme opinion and your decently extreme opinion on left turns (yes, I know this is a potential middle ground fallacy). No you shouldn't barrel on into them but they're not as dangerous as your comment implies. As like most things driving as long as you have decent situational awareness they're fine.
Sadly no one is perfect, building roads that allow misstakes to safely be made is vital. See the road design vision of zero fatality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
I just get some social anxiety when people back up behind me, or anytime I feel like my driving is "imposing" on others. I know it's somewhat irrational. But I doubt a driving lesson would help with my more general problem of social anxiety.
Anyway, I'd rather be this type of driver than an overly dense person who doesn't mind backing up traffic. The type of people that will go sideways blocking four lanes coming out of a gas station to get to the turn lane...
I learned to drive in a "defensive" manner. Yes, sometimes non-action can be more dangerous in a specific situation; but feeling bad about backing up traffic doesn't make me a bad driver. Just an socially anxious one.
I agree though, in the original comment, I probably made it sound worse than it actually is for me. I just wish google maps had this option. I would find driving more pleasant.
I understand your point. I live right behind a three lane road that has left turn onto a street next to my house. You end up turning left across four lanes of traffic and you can’t always see the far lane. The far lane may not back up due to becoming a turn lane and cars are going faster thanks overall traffic. The city disallows left turns from 3-7pm, but I don’t make that turn if there is a modicum of traffic at any point in time. There is at least one accident a week there as people try to make that turn.
Anytime traffic is red, it would be better for nav apps to reroute to safer turns.
almost 20 years... so yeah I dont think it's going away. Being anxious about backing up traffic or the other things I described isn't that abnormal I don't think?
When Ive been a passenger, Ive seen most other drivers feel this way--whether they say it or not, you can see on their face they are feeling anxious.
Yes, we do exist but for someone that does not have a special problem can't see the problem. Many also have a problem with empathy, just can't think how that ever would be a problem.
I definitely relate to the anxiety, but like I said, I've learned over time to control it. Much like stage fright (which I definitely have), I guess it's a situation where you can learn to operate. They are similar in that, other participants want you to succeed and are not judging you as much as you judge yourself. I think what I have learned is that, the less I judge others (on stage, or on the road) and the more empathetic and understanding I am, the less I am worried about others judging me.
Everyone on the road is inconveniencing everyone else all the time. I prefer the strategy of accepting it, rather than letting it bother me. I also don't judge others for inconveniencing me. We're all just trying to get to point B at the end of the day.
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
Any decent road routing engine does take into consideration a "turn penalty" and makes left turns more costly then right, among other things. E.g. see the Valhalla docs (Mapbox's routing engine):
> Turn type - whether the turn is a left turn, right turn, or is crossing another road. The cost applied to the turn type also needs to know if driving is done on the left side or right side of the road. While left turns are generally more costly in the US than right turns, the opposite holds in UK.
With routing applications there are many configurable parameters, rather than providing too many options and risking overwhelming the user some of these things are simply baked into the ETA calculation.
In the Google Maps app (both on Android and Android Auto) you can toggle between "Muted", "Alerts only" and "Unmuted". Alerts only is what I almost always use, and it only comes up to warn of congestion (eg "6 minutes of congestion ahead, this is still the fastest route"), accidents, suggested or required detours, etc.
The Google Maps android and web apps also let you switch between transportation modes to compare driving, walking, cycling and public transit. You can even change it to "leave at" or "arrive by" for any time of day for any day of the week, and it'll give you a decent idea of trip time.
I agree with the other suggestions though, it would be handy to minimize (unprotected) left turns, and optimize travel time.
The last one is probably more nuanced than it seems though. For example, I will usually want to go to the grocery store last to minimize the time groceries are sitting in a hot/freezing car, depending on what I'm buying and the weather.
Though Google Maps does have that handy ability to switch to "Alerts Only" (as does Waze), I agree that it still has a lot of room for improvement. For example, if I'm headed to a new location where I need turn-by-turn directions, I want them turned on. However, I do not need them for getting out of my subdivision. I wish there was a way to have "Alerts Only" for routes I've traveled multiple times and "Unmuted" once Google Maps determines I'm in an area I have not been to before or have only been to a few times.
I've found there can also be an inverse of the "red but no traffic" problem where Google Maps is unable to understand that there can be multiple lanes traveling at different speeds on the same street. When I lived in SF I would always run into this at the freeway entrance on 5th and Bryant (shoutout to the worst intersection in the city). The two leftmost lanes going onto the freeway would be backed up for blocks but because the right lanes were open they would average it to a moderate traffic rating and would always want to route me to get onto the freeway via that shitshow.
I get that all the time in Vancouver. The lane(s) that eventually hit the bridge barely move, but get averaged with the flowing traffic in the other lane. Google Maps will always suggest taking two bridges on my morning commute.
Apple Maps seems to do a better job on this specific issue.
Like others, I'm glad to see somebody else has noticed the turn issue with navigation. Minimising difficult turns (left/right depending on where you are in the world) across multiple lanes would be fantastic.
Many a time I've need to navigate somewhere fast, so even if I could've found my own way there I'll use Gmaps to find the "quickest" router around traffic, etc. Sometimes it works great, others I find I'm having to make a difficult turn across 4 lanes of traffic on both sides of the road, and I'm stuck there in peak hour for 5 mins waiting for a break. Google only optimised for distance and traffic I was in. (I.e. The traffic on both the roads was fast moving, but entering the fast moving traffic took a long time). Optimising only for the speed of traveling in traffic as opposed to entering it (from a turn) can cause this.
Another pet peeve of mine, is if you're doing a long distance road trip, you sometimes want to see where the next stop could be. That is, you haven't planned it, but your destination is set to somewhere 7 hours away and you'd like to stop within the next hour. There's no easy way to see where a good place could be. I want a "road trip" mode where you can bring up something a bit like those road side signs that tell you the distance to the next 5 towns or whatever. So on your phone you tap an info button, and get distance and time to the next x townships that are on your route or a short detour away.
There used to be an app for this exact problem. I think it was called “Up Next”, and it looked at your direction of travel and what was known to be on or near the road, within a given set distance. They made a point of having all the information from all the road signs in their database, and knowing exactly what was available at which exit, which direction you’d have to turn when you got off, and how far you’d have to drive after the exit.
When my wife and I did more road trips, we used to make quite a lot of use of that one.
Not sure whatever happened to it, but I haven’t used it for years.
Microsoft Streets & Trips had this feature around 1997. It also had the feature your parent asked for where it would optimize a route with more than two locations (travelling salesman).
Yes, 1997, so you needed a laptop in your car and a person other than the driver to operate it, but it worked.
> I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes".
I've turned off voice navigation altogether. It's just not necessary in most cases. Just take a minute or two before departure to actually read the map and the route, if you are not pressed for time. It also gives you much better spatial awareness of where you are going and how you are going there.
I check map apps for my best commute option a lot. My gripe is that for each leg of my commute, there are about 3 or 4 options, and I know how to drive all of them, but turn-by-turn insists on explaining it. What I want is a summary when I head out, and possibly an update at decision points. I just have no idea how to make an app (or an interface) for that.
Common scenario: I’m somewhere unfamiliar, going home, and I need to be home at a certain time. Once I’m on the freeway I no longer need the navigation, but I still want the en route traffic info and ETA.
> Once I’m on the freeway I no longer need the navigation, but I still want the en route traffic info and ETA.
Apple Maps on CarPlay added this feature and I love it. It works great for routes where I pretty much know the way but want a heads up for traffic and such.
The case I find most annoying is driving from one city to another. I don't need directions on how to get to the highway, nor on how to drive straight for 200km[1]. I just want directions when I get close to the city I'm unfamiliar with. Currently, the best solution is turning on directions only when I get a chance to stop near my destination city.
[1] It seems this has gotten better in recent years with less frequent nagging to "proceed straight for 50km" from the app.
It’s maybe different in the UK but it’s great to have it for motorway (highway) journeys where a closure of a section of road can leave you dealing with a 4 mile route around winding roads. It’s also great for avoiding the traffic in the first place.
I _hate_ how all map programs think they need to tell you to keep going straight. It seems to be because the road you are on will change its name.
The worst example I've had is that a road changed it's name 70m before it split into two. The app would only show "In XXXm, continue straight" then, with 70m warning, it told me which lane I needed. That was stressful.
Or an option to say, "Hey Google, I'm fine until I get to the highway" or if Google proactively said, "I noticed that the last 5 miles of your route is on roads you have not traveled before. Would you like turn-by-turn directions for the last 5 miles?"
Apple Maps in CarPlay has this option, and I only ever use it muted. It’s fine even when I don’t know where I’m going, since I just glance at the screen to see the next turn/distance and that’s all I need anyway.
Another feature I want is "money is no object mode" when travelling around new york city. Sometimes it's fastest to take the subway, sometimes it's fastest to take a Lyft/Uber, but sometimes it's fastest to take the subway part of the way, and then take an uber from there. This last situation is really tough to figure out by hand with the existing tools.
In general there would also be a use for optimizing time vs cost.
In all driving apps you either take all tolls or none. It should be possible to optimize cost vs time saved, taking some tolls (which gain you enough time to justify their cost), but not all.
I've often thought it would be fun to have a "novel navigate" option, where instead of just picking the fastest route it would try and pick a route that is somehow interesting, or that I haven't been on.
I find it pretty boring to drive the same route over and over, and I'd gladly spend another 15 minutes if it means I get a more interesting route.
> there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area"
Apple Maps (at least in CarPlay) has a "tap for ETA" feature. It collapses the navigation block and only leaves the blue (yellow, red) line on the map and an estimated ETA at the bottom.
I use this daily during my commute where I passively want to know if there's some traffic up ahead, but don't need help to know where I am going.
It's not automatic (e.g. Geo-fence setting), but it is just one tap.
> I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
Google actually already has an api that does exactly this called Google OR-Tools[1]. They could totally build this feature into google map if they want.
> apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity.
Almost all of the “major” popular apps are mediocre, with simple bugs and missing functionality or bad design for years, despite user complaints and requests. Maps, Translate, Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram, Instagram, Discord, Tinder, OKCupid, and even most of Apple’s own stuff. It’s like they fired all but one developer after they became popular.
Honestly i'd love a simplest route option, with minimal turns, especially for areas i dont know well. I'm ok if my driving route takes 5 min longer if I dont have to take a left turn on that 4 lane road, or the weird y intersection, or the very quick left turn followed immediately by the right turn that requires getting across 3 lanes of traffic
On Google maps on mobile, you should be able to touch the volume icon, then pick one of three audio modes, on, off, or one in between where I think it just gives you warnings but not street by street directions (has a speaker with a ! next to it as an icon.
But it only shows up when you are actually routing
No, having a sat nav doesn't obviate the need to be attentive to road signs and the size of your vehicle.
No map data supplier warrants that their data is free from errors, and even if they did the data could be out-of-date within hours as roads are being built all the time.
There is no proof - mathematical or otherwise - a sat nav won't switch off if you fail to plug it in. Neither is there any proof a bridge won't be closed due to roadworks, an accident, or other reasons.
I don't know; I rented a truck in an NYC outer borough for a move and had the hardest time navigating through the city because I had no easily accessible way to figure out where trucks were allowed.
IIRC, minimizing left turns was a massive cost-saving measure for UPS (or was it FedEx?) back when consumer-facing GPS systems were becoming commonplace.
> Multi-destination route optimization is not available.
OsmAnd+ on F-Droid[1] has this feature, although the UX isn't stellar. Add intermediate destinations to your itinerary then the Edit next to intermediate destinations > Sort > Door-to-door.
> Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity.
There are some hidden gems out there. I've been using Locus Map Pro (Android app) for all my cycling and geocaching needs for the last few years, and some of the things you mention do have solutions in it. The app is not at all beginner-friendly, there's like a million various options and functions, but if you're willing to spend time configuring it, usually you can have it do whatever you want.
> I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area
When planning a route, it's possible to choose whether to generate navigation instructions, and this can be chosen for any part of the route separately. It's also possible to delete individual nav instructions or manually add new ones.
> I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map
The route can be saved and then shown/hidden on the map, and there's probably no limit on how many routes can be shown. Color and line width is configurable, too. But yeah, it will be quite a manual process, unfortunately.
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
I think that if the navigation engine is switched to BRouter, it's possible to assign different weights to left/right turns. But I have to admit that tweaking these parameters is too much even for me.
At this point it's also worth mentioning that it only uses OSM routing engines (GraphHopper, BRouter, YOURS), so it can't take traffic into account. Which is fine for my needs (cycling), as I'd rather see the Strava heatmap (and I can!) than live traffic data. :-)
(I'm not affiliated with the project but I do use it a lot and have built an add-on against their API, so I'm a huge fanboy.)
Turning left can also be an extremely time-consuming task. Somebody I know drives a 3km longer route on his daily commute but is home about 10 minutes earlier because the shorter (and Google recommended) route contains two left turns that take incredibly long. Optimizing this should really be a goal.
After many of my travel using Google Maps, I get a notification asking whether the route recommended was right. I never had a bad one (where they asked it at least) so I don't know what happens if I do answer no, but I guess it's to allow to optimize theses kinds of situation.
" ... there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes"."
Yes, this is a very obvious feature that one encounters almost immediately when adopting direction tools like this and, like you, I am quite surprised this isn't fixed.
Related: an option, or even a default, to pause media playback for the duration of directions dictation, rather than just drown it out ... if you are listening to news, etc., you can miss 15+ seconds of content while a longer direction is dictated.
Again: these are not hyper-distilled, personal features that took man hours to discover - these are features that one discovers almost immediately, across a broad spectrum of use-cases. Very surprising that it hasn't been "fixed".
About pausing media playback versus fading down the audio, on iOS, this is controlled completely by the OS, but on Android, it's up to the media player. There's an audiobook player for Android called Smart Audiobook Player that does pause its playback when something else cuts in. For me, this usually happens when I do something that makes the TalkBack screen reader [1] speak while playing an audiobook.
Google has recently started to tip its toes in something I've been wanting for so many years: mixing transit and cycling. But it's still mostly useless. For now Google suggests I cycle to the train and then take the train and then change to the subwat, and then walk the rest of the way. But what I want is to take my bike _inside_ the train with me, commute only in transit that allows bikes, and then bike the last mile.
The left turn (or in my case in Australia, right turn) problem is huge and my biggest issue with google maps (and I expect the others are the same but I don’t use any others).
I don’t want to take a backstreet only to pop out at the freeway where I need to turn over 6 lanes with no lights....
I feel it’s getting worse, it’s like google maps is trying to get trickier about where it sends you but the outcome for me seems to be getting worse.
Or, I know there is a faster way, but I want to go via this road.
The number of times I’ve patiently entered multiple points to force a certain route, only to have it ‘optimise’ it for me, on route, without a clear notification, is incredibly frustrating.
It’s not always about the destination, sometimes it’s about the journey. And no, I don’t care that it’s 7 minutes slower!!
the best is the complicated left turn on a busy intersection to save a 1 minute. Litearlly, the other route is a minute longer. It seems like a clash of computers versus reality. The reasons a route is optimal is still not known to a gps system.
I often do multi-destination optimization manually on Google Maps desktop. It's practical to solve the small-n travelling salesman problem through manual brute force, it should be doable automatically.
Not sure if everyone knows about this, but if you click on the headlines on this website, like "Google Maps Hacks," in this case, there's an article there. Most of us are using the comment space in this forum to discuss what's in the articles behind each of the headlines. It's a really great forum for doing this because there are many bright people close to the tech discussed. For example, it sounds like you've got some experience with the tech, so I'm curious what your thoughts would be on the content in the article behind this headline.
* On busy streets, left turns through uncontrolled intersections can have high variability. So you might be unlucky and get stuck for several minutes waiting to turn. A slower, but more predictable route might be better if you need to arrive on time.
* Left turns are simply more stressful than right turns. Saving a minute might not be worth the pain.
Your variability point extends beyond just left turns. Routes with lots of lights or that cross train tracks have extra variability. If I'm leaving with barely enough time I want directions that have low time variance since I cannot afford to be on the wrong side of the distribution. Other times I'm willing to risk some variance for a shorter expected time.
My personal pet peeve: using the wrong language for the region. So, I'm a native English speaker - but I'm driving around Germany. Give me the names of the streets in German only - NOPE.
Still can't find any way to fix this issue. Its terribly annoying.
When a German street name is synthesised using English settings, its a proper butchering. Just not good at all.
I want the instructions in English - but I want the place-names in the native language. This is the only sensible way, yet none of the Maps vendors seem to have understood this. Do they not use their products?
Semi-related anecdote: A few years ago, for a while Google Maps insisted on labelling White City (in London) as "White Stadt" and the M25 as "Autoroute brittanique M25" (and not just for French users).
Wow, I never actually stopped to think about the way Google determines traffic but it seems so obvious now. This is a very simple but cool trick, I'd expect to see something like this in an action movie where people need to reroute an important car to a particular street.
Anyone have any idea how often this data is updated? So if the guy runs through a street with a cart and it turns red, when will it show up as clear?
I guess an important piece (conveniently left out of this story) is that it does not work if there are other cars on the road, as these cars quickly invalidate the data coming from the slow cart.
I don't know what the tipping point is, but it'd probably take more than one. I've commuted through backed up/stopped/solid red sections on a motorcycle where I just get to lane-split and cruise through, and it'd still stay red.
not the GP, and I don't how it's done, but my Google Maps timeline does distinguish between motorcycling and car trips, however its reliability is questionable. It has often mis-categorised my motorcycle trips as car trips, but rarely if ever the reverse.
I would guess (unsubstantiated) that it classifies a motorcycle trip as being unexpectedly fast through many traffic jams.
I always assumed an average was performed over instantaneous velocity that fall in network segments. So, it would depend on the relative magnitude and the edge count on the graph in question you wanted to manipulate.
For a long very straight road represented as a single edge, I would assume if you had 100 actual cars, you'd get an average of the manipulated data rate and the real flow rate.
It works out to the same thing, more or less, but I'd guessed they used proximity nodes (junctions) and then when you reach another node use the time (discounting outliers).
Then do the calculations at the server for speed and such.
I was going through an empty road in an empty area (no buildings nearby) in the middle of the night, and somehow it's red on google map. Turns out there was a single car stopping on the side of the road, and that's enough to make google maps think there was a congestion there. As soon as I passed the car, the road is green again.
Google maps and other navigational apps could potentially flood residential routes that weren't supposed to handle traffic. People have done different measures to combat this. One anecdote is:
"And in 2016, in Takoma Park, Maryland, residents went to great lengths to prevent Waze drivers from flooding their roads during a bridge reconstruction project. A Takoma Park man reportedly started reporting phantom wrecks and traffic jams on his street before Waze banned him" ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-05-0...
This is a hack in an older, juvenile sense of the word, the sense that found cars on top of MIT buildings and football fans holding up cards that spell "we suck" in aggregate.
I might be getting older but "hack" these days seems to just mean "go to work" or even "go to work on the weekend".
This is just like releasing an un-weaponized buffer overflow.
It's now up to someone else to see where they can push it.
Create a app that connects everyone's phones and spoofs GPS(Not sure this is technically easy) as a group.... What can you do?
Create secret clubs of commuters? Draw a penis on Google maps?
Fake data during viral outbreaks to maximise peoples exposures by making them all use the same overloaded car park at a hospital? Move cars into locations were there are riots?
Google Maps data was used by researchers during the protests in Tehran. I'm sure the three letter agencies use it as well.
This video is a bit of a seminal moment for me. It's made me realise the information and tools we rely on and assume are true are actually just systematic fabrications produced by self-serving corporations, and are not necessarily the truth whatsoever.
If that's what you want to call models, sure. It doesn't matter whether it's a 503(c) or a corporation, modeling the real world is imperfect and messy.
What a predictably cynical interpretation. Your immediate reaction to the application of imperfect models to the real world need not be one of distrust as if slighted but rather simple acknowledgment that this is just the best we can currently do.
This is a perfectly concise articulation of my thoughts as well. I will add that it is still good to keep in mind that owners of the models are indeed self-serving, but it does not need to be a cynical thing. Most of the time, the self serving motivation is to simply provide the best service possible
You have a point. Perhaps it's Google users' fault as much as anyone else's, to form such trusting emotional bonds to the Google service in the first place. However:
1. Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality.
2. If corporations like Google really wanted to do "the best we can currently do", they'd try harder but instead they just do "the best we need to do to make billions of dollars from collecting people's data."
Case in point, turns out Yandex image search is better than Google's. Google won't try harder if no one knows there's something better.
> Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality.
What do you propose they do? Have cameras on every street instead? Somehow spend a fortune to embed sensors in to every roadway on earth?
As it turns out, when you aggregate a ton of (hopefully) anonymized data, you can get some really cool shit. Like the "how busy is this business" thing they have for a lot of businesses.
We use estimations to approximate some real-world truth, then we mistake those estimations for the truth, until somebody breaks the illusion and it turns out that the information we thought we were getting (e.g. cars on a road) was in truth something else.
This happens a lot when driving around on smaller highways in rural areas here in the US. We even joke when we see red on the map; is it a real slowdown or did the one driver with Google Maps slow down to pass a tractor?
Has anyone tried using Maps? I don't think it solves the left turn problem, but I am extremly unhappy with google maps interface and pushing of ads. After a bit of searching I have found Maps and never turned back. Well, I hope it comes handy to someone else too...
tried, didn't work. I use osmand, altough it works fine for regular navigation, it's kinda slow and eats all my batteries.
i'm givin nokia maps (here maps) a second chance
That 10px font size is not accessible. I can't read what's there without zooming in. It looked like decorative text or legal disclosures for a contest or something. Did the site's creator find that the ideal text size to use?
Much better than the more common scenario of driving to work with an all green route and then finding that traffic is at a standstill. And then seconds later Google Maps marks the road as red. This happens so much that I don't trust all green routes to work anymore.
I'm stunned how fast Google Maps detects traffic jams.
I assume all those smartphones are running car navigation and as traffic detection works by trusting the clients I fear there's no chance to avoid this kind of exploit.
Nevertheless it would be interesting to know what's the ratio of correct / malicious clients to fool the system. That migt highly depend on whether Google implemented any detection of faulty clients.
Google maps runs also a lot of the time on background so no active navigation is required. I wonder if the introduction of background location activity notifications in iOS 13 decreased the amount of traffic data gathered from iPhone users.
I want one app to track my position at all times. I use google because I’m unaware of another—and I figure they have optimized the energy consumption of doing so. Then again, would be thrilled if someone could recommend an alternate way of doing this on iOS (preferably native).
PS this function allowed me to time stamp my location which proved incredibly helpful in a FOFA request with state patrol—got me out of a ticket that should never have been issued!
I requested footage from the patrol person’s vehicle. They circled back and needed the exact time of footage (I was ticketed long after the alleged violation). So this was me personally using the time stamp to surface the window of footage necessary. Turns out the camera caught a car veering into my lane that the officer “did not remember”, thereby exonerating me of swerving into the shoulder.
You can probably avoid it by more accuracy somehow. If the road is just for 1 car width, and there are 50 cars in the same radius (because all are inside the cart), it’s an impossible scenario.
I think gps accuracy is something like 3 meters, which is about one car length.
The situation could also easily be discovered by probing accelerometers of the phones that travel in groups. Separate vehicles don't exhibit perfectly synchronized acceleration and deceleration, especially not in a traffic jam.
I don't think enough people use Google maps in my area for it to be consistent much of the time.
Lots of random (not on map) or way out of date slowdows. The reporting feature doesn't seem to do much.
Granted otherwise it is a great app, and I don't pretend to have the solutions to the wonkyness, just wonky at times when it comes to identifying traffic issues.
That would make sense as far as the area's I'm thinking of are along the burgs outer ring roads so I don't think there is nearly as much outer ring Uber action.
From my last experience circa 1/2 years ago, you just need to be the only one on the road.
About that time I was driving up at odd hours on a highway, when I noticed a yellow stretch on google maps coming up.
Turns out the highway was mostly empty, and the only other vehicle in the road was a truck, which is limited to a fraction of the top speed.
The A14 north of Cambridge has recently been rerouted, and towards the end of the project - but months before it opened - Bing maps showed green traffic across countryside where the construction workers were moving along the new road.
I guess you do not need a data plan. Or even phones. Just spin up n android emulators and spoof them with the gps data you want? (Disclaimer: I fully expect that to break multiple TOS clauses so I take no responsibility whatsoever if anyone tries this one.)
This may be a bit naive question, but how does Google know that the virtual phone is not a real phone and the signal is not true? In a way that is not spoofable?
Google spun-off Niantic and I hear they have pretty good anti-GPS spoofing algorithms/NNs (for Pokemon Go), I wouldn't be surprised if they use the same or similar tech for GMaps.
As someone who uses a spoofer app for Pokemon Go, the anti-spoofing is pretty limited.
There is a "you can't go 500 miles in 10 seconds" style check, that checks your displacement against your previous position periodically to makes sure it's realistic,
something that makes sure your GPS is always drifting a little, like a normal phone GPS would report (which the spoofer app builds in),
and other little things such as if it has camera permissions and you take a photo in game, the location in the photo metadata matches your in game location.
I usually play in my house in the North of England and regularly spoof the app to be in London, New York, Paris Mall or Tokyo.
Seems like someone who is malicious could spin up a bunch of VMs, spoof their gps as slow moving across various streets to simulate traffic jams. Even sophisticated spoofing would have hard time detecting this.
You could even do the inverse, simulate no traffic but have virtual cars go through streets faster than usual even if there is a traffic jam!
Would we have some major impacts in the economy of an area if major highways are simulated at high traffic earlier/later than usual over the course of many days?
Could affect local city transportation budgets to build or not build roads/new streets if they base their data solely on analytics coming from Google.
Bots have become more and more sophisticated, so niche types of manipulation is harder to detect, and for something like GPS you can't really prompt a RECAPTCHA before routes are used.
Cell phone tower data probably doesn't suffer from this risk as much, since you have to pay for cellular data and spoofing data to cell towers is probably more difficult.
We hacked Google's maps to make a web-based "GPS" system, like the navigation on the phone. It's not perfect, but it allows us to do things like have the driver share their geolocation in the Web browser, without putting it in the background, and without downloading any native apps.
I'd say very little in the Qbix Platform is hacked together, but this is one of those things. It's not in the core, we have it in the Travel plugin. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Q7IzVv1VU
I can't wait until some rich neighbors get together to buy a bunch of phones to use this to keep people off "their" streets. I'm sure there will be some startup selling this service in parts of the Bay Area in no time.
I'd love a motorcycle mode aka "ignore traffic", in states/jurisdictions where lane filtering/splitting is allowed. I don't want to have to go offline to avoid it taking into account current traffic.
This is really no different than spammy SEO in web documents.
One can only imagine the accuracy of virtual Android simulators running fake GPS and Google Maps if there was money to be made on fooling the traffic analysis.
Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other and report it to Maps, which would then presumably figure out that they're too close to represent separate vehicles?
> Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other
Because GPS in built-up areas has super low precision and position estimates jump by tens of meters. A cart of phones is going to be almost indistinguishable from a pack of cars.
"But missosoup don't phones also have accelerometers and gyros?"
Sure, but they're used to feed into a Kalman filter that produces the position estimate. Apps don't generally access high resolution sensor feeds because the positioning service is already doing the best job possible. Even with that, it's hard to distinguish multiple cars accelerating from a green light compared to a bag of mobile phones being carted around.
tl;dr: it's hard. Measures can be taken to filter out these attacks but they'll come at the expense of reducing the accuracy of regular traffic data. Unless these attacks start becoming a real problem, it's probably not worth it.
Just a guess: there's little economic incentive to perform this attack, and it would also be pretty expensive to perform regularly. So detecting and preventing it has not been a priority up to now. If people started doing it regularly, I'm sure countermeasures would be put in place.
Expensive in time compared to benefit accrued/harm done. At a minimum you have to spend a person's time on it, both in the gathering of a bunch of used phones, the setting up of many phone lines, and the actual work of walking on the street. A small street seeming busy on Google Maps doesn't really matter that much. Especially, if the street is not actually busy, since that's kind of an indicator that people don't really want to use it anyway. So the amount of traffic you'd potentially divert is similarly small.
This seems really obvious to me, so if it doesn't seem that way to you, maybe we just have different priors. I can't explain it any better than this, though.
It doesn't strike me as particularly expensive compared to getting thirty-plus bicyclists to go down the street in a block like the Critical Mass activists do.
Critical mass tends to target busy city streets, partly perhaps with the goal of causing actual congestion. I daresay it wouldn't serve as much of a protest if the entire goal were making Google maps look worse.
This paper (2013) might be of interest
"We demonstrate in practice how hackers can take control of navigation systems and, in the case of a wide distribution of floating car data, can actively control the traffic flow."
Does anyone else get a bit of unexpected joy when they drive through a section of ‘red’ road without any actual traffic? It makes me feel like I saved a bit of time in my life.
I wonder whether Google Maps takes into account the various ways of transportation, such as bicycles, public transports, or electric cars driving on the bus lines.
Indeed, I wonder exactly why Google maps thought all these smartphones were in a car at all. Can only assume they were all configured to be following driving directions.
I drove through North Lake Tahoe one time on a weekday around midnight, and Google Maps was showing all red as I was driving up the mountain... I was super confused as there were no cars around me and it was not snowing either. What I later realized was that all the trucks were parked alongside the freeway taking breaks... I never realized that you could basically trick Google Maps by using a bunch of cellphones. Very neat!
I imagine that if this is widespread they'll be able to use spam-filtering style stuff to get data from reliable accounts like mine (lots of reviews, location history on for decades, etc.) to override this stuff.
An interesting reminder that all crowdsourced data does suffer from operating in an adversarial space. Wikipedia to Traffic.
This is a pretty cool hack. I can see neighborhood watch groups using it to keep Waze from routing people down their streets during rush hour.
It is also a nice demonstration of how people who understand automation can "work the system" in ways that people who don't understand automation cannot.
Not sure exactly how rideshare prices are calculated but say you're picking someone up on a street -- you could potentially make a fake traffic jam on the street so that the app would calculate a longer route and hence pay you more.
Please thing I never understood was there app insisting on this is still the fastest route. As if it's supposed to be anything else when you searched for the fastest route to start with.
How does the cellular network location sharing work? Would it be possible to use 1 radio to spoof multiple devices there, or is there going to be enough security to prevent that?
I don't think everyone has to be using car navigation mode. The traffic in my small town is shown on Google Traffic and I doubt locals here need navigation to get back to their home 5km away.
If it was only phones running Maps, they wouldn't get much data.
Phones running Maps are actively using the GPS, so they provide more precise data. Those sitting idle just get tower location, which helps fill in some vague flow information but doesn't do much for specific street or momentary speed.
> Google’s map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is ... and how they look aesthetically.
Paper maps used to look like a diagrammatic network of streets, with pale background and yellow for main roads, and our fundamental understanding of what a map is, was that it was a tool for navigation.
Now with Google Maps, maps look like ??? and our fundamental understanding of what a map is, is ???.
To me, this is not so much about Google Maps or even "hacking" a computer system, but rather about how and how much computer information systems shape our view of reality, and how fake news may be created simply by naive and/or buggy software. It's just that in this case the big gap between view and reality can easily be shown by some photos or a simple video, while in case of search engines or recommendation systems, or advertising, it is much harder to show. To me this is kind of a "the emperor is naked" moment for surveillance capitalism, and even more so, as it is that simple.
Google/Android fights this sort of abuse by making short lifetimes for smartphones, so adversary can't accumulate many working secondhand phones, or Google can detect and filter them by obsolete OS version :-D
On another navigation related topic; I was using Waze in a high-traffic city, where even the alternate routes have a lot of traffic. I was thinking, it surely would be possible for Waze to look back along my route and calculate which route would have been better for me.
E.g. if I drove from A via B, C, D, E towards Z, and there was an alternate route A-B-F-G-E-Z, and the route branches out at B (you can either take path B-C-D-E or path B-F-G-E), the app could find a car that was near me at point B, and went to F later on. It would then know the time I would have needed to drive from B to F. This ghost car doesn't need to go all the way to E, if it turned off at F, the app could find another car, one which at that point was at point F and later on drove to G (or better, E), and then see how much time they took. And so on for each segment of my alternate route...