This reminds me of how in some ways online maps are far inferior to what the old road maps like the ones Rand McNally printed thirty years ago. The Google map

This reminds me of how in some ways online maps are far inferior to what the old road maps like the ones Rand McNally printed thirty years ago. The Google map doesn’t have symbols to distinguish major roads from minor ones. For instance, in the US a printed map would typically have different symbols for free limited-access highway, toll limited-access highway, multilane divided but not limited-access highway, major two-lane road, minor two-lane road, local road, gravel road, and dirt road. Google has none of this; it just has lines of vaguely different width and color intensity. So in the US I know that if the route has an Interstate highway I know what to expect. Typically a US highway is at least a major route, though you can’t count on it. If it’s a state highway, who knows. The map tells you little about the size or condition of these non-Interstate routes. So if Google routes me down a non-Interstate route, sometimes I will look at the street view to gauge it. If it shows a big divided highway, I’m good. But sometimes it shows a two-lane road with no shoulders, multiple driveways, and hills blocking the view. Completely unacceptable for driving more than a few miles if there’s absolutely any alternative, yet Google will send you down these roads for two hundred miles if it thinks you’ll save ten minutes—-which you won’t the instant you get stuck behind some slow dump truck. I don’t know this situation in Russia but years ago on a paper map in the US, that deadly route would have been shown as a minor road on a paper map, in it was on there at all, while the major, safer route would have been shown prominently. I just marvel at how tech takes us forward in most ways but how the old tech had superior elements that simply don’t get replicated even decades later. (Another example is how old print maps showed rest areas and even distinguished them from simple no-restroom pull-offs. This information is not on Google at all.)