Google Maps 4+

Google Maps is great for driving. For public transportation, however, I don’t recommend Google Maps. Often I find they only mention a few of the options, or the app is unable to think creatively about all of the public transportation options. A recent example- I was staying in rural Massachusetts and had to travel to Burlington VT. Google maps suggested I get a taxi to the commuter rail, then take the commuter rail all the way to Boston, then take a bus to Burlington. That trip costs about $150 total, and with the transportation scheduling, makes for an 8am to 6pm travel day. What wasn’t shown in the Google map is I could’ve taken a long taxi ride to board the Boston to Burlington bus at another spot further north. Despite the high cost of a long taxi ride, it actually makes for a cheaper trip overall, and cuts down travel time by FIVE hours. I’ve found it over and over again that Google maps just doesn’t get creative with combining public transportation options. Sites like Rome2Rio work better, and honestly usually I find much better solutions if I bother to look up train schedules, etc. individually. That’s time consuming, so it’d be nice if GoogleMaps could plan better combined transportation options for users.

It has problems that just don’t seem to be addressed. 1) If you submit a correction to the map (ie no left turn at an intersection), the change is adopted (yay) but then gets changed back to the erroneous display at a later update. (Boo) 2) each update seems to mute alerts. STOP IT! Why is this changing? Why do I need to find out my voice commands have been shut off yet again? I don’t need to try to sort this out after I’m on the road. 3) connection interruption with Car Play screws up the routing. If you have the “correct” route you’ve been following and say halfway there your carplay connection gets interrupted for whatever reason google maps will not display the route you were on, it will offer longer routes. No idea why it does this. You need to back up and re-set “your location” again and then ask for directions to get the original route to reappear. Again, not something that you should have to sort out when on the road. 4) very reluctant to offer alternative routes. You can get caught up in a 30 minute delay of traffic and there are alternative routes available and it will not offer them. 5) poor judge of traffic delays based on historic data. I know how bad traffic is on certain days and times where I live. Google Maps consistently underestimates travel time when you select “leave by” reminders by a good 15-20%. This hasn’t changed in the decade+ I’ve been using the app.

It’s alright. Buggy sometimes even with good signal. When I search along the route it will sometimes not come up with any search results, only for me to pass the very thing I searched for prior in my drive. And no it wasn’t a new business, it had been around for years. Also when I search places, one will say it’s 10 minutes out of the way while the other says only a few. Only to realize that the faster one ended up not being as simple as they said, and that the slower one (+10 minutes) was only slow because for some reason it had me take side roads completely around it before arriving, when I could have simply turned directly into it from the road I was on, making it a quick trip. Not all gas stations show up in searches, it almost seems to favor the expensive gas stations. There’s doesn’t seem to be an algorithm that keeps track of the bad traffic times. It will re rout my whole trip to a significantly slower route if it senses traffic, even if that traffic is close to the end of my trip hours away and will be cleared well before I get to that point. If you’re a contractor that has to go in and out of many neighborhoods, it normally recognizes certain entrances while not recognizing others, so it will take you completely around the neighborhood 30 minutes away to the other entrance when you have just passed a perfectly good entrance that has been around forever. It’s still one of the better gps apps, but still way to buggy to trust it