Google Maps Issues and navigating

[grabeb]

Is anyone else having or seeing any issues lately?

It seems the last two times I've used it for navigating on a trip, it's given me incorrect directions. For instance, I was traveling about a month ago and I needed to get off a South Bound HWY to go East on another and it sent me two miles west to do a U-Turn, when it should have just picked the clover leaf exit 1/4 mile or less up the road. By the time I realized what it had done it was too late. It's a trip I take once a year or so and I just wasn't thinking and like I said once I realized it was too late.

Then this past weekend, I was out of town and again, it did similar things. It'd put me a 1/4 mile away or say turn left when I needed to turn right and at one point I was trying to find a store and that turned out to be on the HWY I was on, but it sent me down some back wards roads through a rural neighborhood to get to the store. IF I had stayed on the main HWY, it would have been maybe 3min up the road coming from the west, but as it was, I had to go about 10min through this dirt road neighborhood and then when I finally reached the same HWY again, I had to go back a good 1/2-3/4 mile to get where I needed to go.

I'm thinking maybe an update screwed up the mapping and direction portion. I'm thinking of uninstalling Maps and trying again, or even just uninstalling updates.

 

[N4Newbie]

There have been many times that I wished I could go into a navigation app's logs to find an explanation for why it chose a particular route.

Sometimes it will route you based on (perhaps outdated) knowledge of a traffic incident or construction along the "preferred" route. Sometimes it is because it knows that the road you are on does not allow mid-block left turns. Sometimes it gets confused by new construction or - I used to get this one often in Boston - confused when one roadway is directly above or below another and it is not really certain which of the two you are actually driving on. Sometimes there are momentary GPS issues and, by the time it realizes you need to turn, it is already too late to do so, so it re-routes.

Some navigation apps always seem to choose the least-distance route, even if that is going to take longer. Others seem to choose the least-time route, even if it takes you a few miles out of your way. We went south for the Thanksgiving holiday and were driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike yesterday morning when Waze chose a particularly odd route to get me over the George Washington Bridge; rather than just staying on I-95/NJ Turnpike and feeding directly into the GW, it had me exit onto Route 46. Looking at it on a map just now, I can see where that route is probably a bit shorter however I would never have bothered with the extra work just to save a few miles let alone a few minutes. But this raises an interesting point - sometimes you need to look carefully at a map to have a real understanding of what the app was doing and whether or not it was reasonable: