Spacial Cognitive De-Skilling

I'm always amazed how accurate Google Maps is. It is usually on the dot when it comes to estimated time of arrival
 
CC268 said:
I'm always amazed how accurate Google Maps is. It is usually on the dot when it comes to estimated time of arrival
Click to expand...

If you watch it, it adjusts constantly. It's usually off by five minutes or so when you start. Note the ETA at start and see if that is the actual time you arrive. It often isn't. Give it a really long road trip route, and it is very bad at those. It's off by more than ah hour or two, quite often.

It's accuracy has more to do with the fact that people have short routes in cities than inherent accuracy of calculations.
 
I think the Garmin Nuvi will adjust ETA based on your own driving habits. For example: If you are the kind of person who normally drives over the speed limit, it takes that into account when calculating drive times in advance.

It can't take into account rest stops, but it will update on a continuous basis.

The worst I had was last summer on an XC road trip pulling a trailer. I couldn't maintain the speed limit well at all on many of the interstate stretches. It hurt watching that estimated arrival time get later...and later...and later.
 
denverpilot said:
If you watch it, it adjusts constantly. It's usually off by five minutes or so when you start. Note the ETA at start and see if that is the actual time you arrive. It often isn't. Give it a really long road trip route, and it is very bad at those. It's off by more than ah hour or two, quite often.

It's accuracy has more to do with the fact that people have short routes in cities than inherent accuracy of calculations.
Click to expand...

Yea I notice it changes as you go (although usually not more than a few minutes). I've actually never made a real long road trip with it but it doesn't surprise me that it would be off by quite a bit on a really long trip.
 
I personally shy away from using GPS much on the road and always study my routes on a map before leaving. As a result of going that my whole life, I would feel confident heading off to anywhere between Boise, ID and Miami, FL or Los Angeles and D.C. without out looking at a map at all. It might not be the fastest route, but I'll get there.

Now, when it comes to getting to a specific spot on short notice (such as an enroute restaurant stop) in an unfamiliar city, I bust out the Google Maps.
 
CC268 said:
Yea I notice it changes as you go (although usually not more than a few minutes). I've actually never made a real long road trip with it but it doesn't surprise me that it would be off by quite a bit on a really long trip.
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Doesn't even have to be *really* long. A hundred miles will do it. I have days that's my normal commute, if I have to detour to run errands, so I see the errors in both Google Maps and Waze firsthand. Both usually err on the early side. Both are even fed in most metros with both government sourced speed information on major roads, and user sourced information, and they still are a bit over-zealous.

I think part of it is whatever methodology they use for time to remove an accident scene. Used to be "scoop and go" and clear the road, if an accident wasn't fatal, but lately public safety folks dawdle on the scene for hours.

The mapping algorithm folks need to up that time by quite a bit and rely on user data passing through the area at full speed to clear it from the routing algorithm. They seem to use more of a "timeout" function than a "real data" function to clear massive jams.

Some of that is probably backlash from neighborhoods who HATE when a highway jams and the mapping engines route all the traffic through what are otherwise quiet neighborhoods because the back streets have actually become faster. They've probably dumbed down the routings to NOT do that as much.

The further the routing the less actual routing work the engines do, too. I've seen them give the bog standard routing for my 100 miles, when I know there's a better way it has shown before, when servers are busy or cellular connectivity to them is slow. Sometimes it'll pop up a few miles down the road and say it found a better route, sometimes I just drive the better route and it reconfigures when it thinks I "missed a turn" and the time drops significantly after it calculates where I just went.

Fun gadgets to watch and play with. I don't fully trust them. They have some significant logic bugs in them.

I wish instead of "avoid toll roads" as an on/off switch, it instead had "only consider a toll road when it'll take X% off of the travel time. I'm constantly switching Waze in and out of toll road mode to see if it's worth the $8. LOL.
 
1) We generally tow our travel trailer at 55 mph, so we see the eta creep inexorably up. So it goes.

2) Waze is our go-to navigator, and we've learned to trust it for the most part. When it gets us off the interstate for no apparent reason, often the reason becomes apparent later. It has saved us many, many hours in traffic, and just as importantly it keeps us moving.
 
denverpilot said:
Doesn't even have to be *really* long. A hundred miles will do it. I have days that's my normal commute, if I have to detour to run errands, so I see the errors in both Google Maps and Waze firsthand. Both usually err on the early side. Both are even fed in most metros with both government sourced speed information on major roads, and user sourced information, and they still are a bit over-zealous.

I think part of it is whatever methodology they use for time to remove an accident scene. Used to be "scoop and go" and clear the road, if an accident wasn't fatal, but lately public safety folks dawdle on the scene for hours.

The mapping algorithm folks need to up that time by quite a bit and rely on user data passing through the area at full speed to clear it from the routing algorithm. They seem to use more of a "timeout" function than a "real data" function to clear massive jams.

Some of that is probably backlash from neighborhoods who HATE when a highway jams and the mapping engines route all the traffic through what are otherwise quiet neighborhoods because the back streets have actually become faster. They've probably dumbed down the routings to NOT do that as much.

The further the routing the less actual routing work the engines do, too. I've seen them give the bog standard routing for my 100 miles, when I know there's a better way it has shown before, when servers are busy or cellular connectivity to them is slow. Sometimes it'll pop up a few miles down the road and say it found a better route, sometimes I just drive the better route and it reconfigures when it thinks I "missed a turn" and the time drops significantly after it calculates where I just went.

Fun gadgets to watch and play with. I don't fully trust them. They have some significant logic bugs in them.

I wish instead of "avoid toll roads" as an on/off switch, it instead had "only consider a toll road when it'll take X% off of the travel time. I'm constantly switching Waze in and out of toll road mode to see if it's worth the $8. LOL.
Click to expand...

That's actually one of the few complaints I have about the TomTom Go Mobile app. But I haven't seen that functionality in any GPS unit or app from any manufacturer; so either there's little demand for it or it would be too complex to code and process given the constantly-changing traffic conditions.

I started using the TomTom app about a year or so ago when I was doing some tests using an Android phone, some of which were related to navigation and the specific data transfer involved using different apps. I got to keep the phone afterwards, but the main reason I decided to keep using it despite my dislike of all things Google was the TomTom app. Aside from having good privacy options, it was overall the best car navigation system I ever used.

The thing I like most about it is that it does seem to display and consider traffic conditions for the entire route at the time of initial routing. It also knows the difference between ephemeral delays (accidents and the like) and ongoing ones (mainly construction), and only considers those that will likely affect routing for a particular trip. It also gives enough warning to route around most delays that occur en route.

Its knowledge of road conditions is uncanny. It knows of an ongoing short delay on a state highway in the middle of nowhere, not far from me, where a bridge is under repair and the road is down to one lane. There's an automatic flagger light timing the traffic in alternating directions 24/7 in roughly three-minute cycles. It doesn't display the construction icon (a little dude with a shovel), but rather the unknown incident icon (yellow or red stripes overlaying the road, depending on how long the delay is at a particular time). That means the telemetry indicates that there's a delay there, but not the precise reason because no one has bothered to report it.

Interestingly, this particular delay is on a part of the road that has no cell service, but the location displayed is accurate. I guess it caches the data and sends it the next time it has a signal.

The app also displays traffic cameras (both fixed and mobile) and other police activity if it's been reported by users. There's also an icon for roadblocks or checkpoints, but I don't recall ever having seen it used. Maybe it's illegal in the U.S. Multiple police car icons in the same place along with a generic delay symbol, however, usually mean a roadblock or checkpoint. There also are warning icons for high winds, snow, ice, schools, and places where accidents are frequent (an exclamation point), even if there's no accident reported there at the moment.

The accuracy and timeliness of the traffic information has earned my trust sufficiently that I routinely use the TomTom app on long trips even if I know the routing by heart. It's saved me many hours by routing me around delays. It also uses very little data because the basemaps are stored on the SD card, so it just uses mobile data for telemetry.

On the down side, TomTom does tend to route over roads that are... well, interesting, to say the least. But in fairness, that can be tweaked in the settings. I have routing over unpaved roads enabled because shortcuts over dirt roads connecting major roads are often part of the fastest routes up here. If I disabled unpaved roads, the routing would be less harrowing.

TomTom is also amenable to feedback about truly horrible roads and usually demotes, for lack of a better word, the worst of them when the maps are updated. The roads stay on the maps, but are only used when there's literally no way around them or when the user has both "Shortest Distance" and "Allow Unpaved Roads" selected as routing options.

In short, I was impressed enough with the TomTom app (as well as the Motorola phone hardware itself) that I decided to keep using the phone, albeit with as much as the Google **** removed or disabled as possible while still retaining the functionality I need. I also opened a separate Google account that I use for nothing else besides the phone in order to compartmentalize and hopefully frustrate Google's datamining. It's really that good an app.

Rich
 
Matthew said:
The worst I had was last summer on an XC road trip pulling a trailer. I couldn't maintain the speed limit well at all on many of the interstate stretches. It hurt watching that estimated arrival time get later...and later...and later.
Click to expand...

Ugh yeah +1

My truck + trailer weigh over 26000 lbs so I drive the trucker speed limit. I keep having to tell my wife to add 1 hour for every 5 estimated.

Wish they had a "trucker speed" option in Google maps.
 
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