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Google Maps has a few quirks. Here in Germany it always prefers to send you through 30km/h residential zones. Which might be somewhat faster than taking congest
by kybernetyk 4y ago
Google Maps has a few quirks. Here in Germany it always prefers to send you through 30km/h residential zones. Which might be somewhat faster than taking congested main roads but those 30km/h zones are terrible to drive through. There's always cars parked at one side of the street so you have to wait for oncoming traffic. The streets usually are very narrow. So the stress level to the driver is way higher.
I also noticed a quirk where it would send me 2km down a road just to turn back and drive the 2km back to where I came from. First few times I thought I must have added a waypoint but nope - sometimes it just makes you waste time.
Apple Maps might be better but I can't use it as it has a quirk with "Environmental Zones" in Germany. There are 3 kinds of zones: Red, Yellow and Green. Your car has a badge with a color (depends on how environmentaly friendly it is). So a green badge can enter every zone, a yellow badge only yellow and red zones, and a red badge only red zones.
Now whenever Apple Maps encounters such a zone in the route the navigation switches to a waaaay zoomed out view (tends to display the whole route on a map). So you can't really see the next turn, etc.
To get rid of that view Apple Maps expects you to click on OK. Which really sucks while driving.
What's infuriating is that you can't turn off the env zone checking or even just tell Maps that "my car has a green badge so PLEAS FOR F SAKES STOP PESTERING ME EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER A ZONE". (Those zones are very common - every bigger town is a green zone. So Apple Maps becomes _really_ unusable on longer trips).
- b4je7d7wb 4y agoThat sounds horrible for yellow and red cars. I hope all new cars are green.
- kybernetyk 4y agoyeah, yellow is like very old diesels and red is for cars without a catalytic converter. so most cars (even my RAM 1500) have a green badge
- jefftk 4y agoElectric cars are all green, gas cars are green if they meet EURO 1, and diesel cars are green if they meet EURO 4 (or EURO 3 + retrofitted particulate filter)[1]. This is pretty loose for passenger cars: any made in the last fifteen years should all qualify [2]. [1] https://www.germanemissionssticker.com https://www.germanemissionssticker.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards
- cyclever 4y agoI hope cars are mostly forbidden in cities soon.
- kybernetyk 4y agoThey are in most European cities anyway. I'm in a - for the US small, for Europe mid sized city with a pop of roughly 400k. City center is banned to cars. You're supposed to park on the outskirts or take public transport into the center. (Or bicycle). The result is that almost no one goes there anymore. All the inner city shops are closing down - while the mall style shopping centers on the outskirts are flourishing. Walkable cities sound great in theory. Until you realize that shopping groceries _really_ sucks when you have to carry full bags for 3 kilometers or have to use over-filled public transport.
- izacus 4y agoI'm just annoyed that Google Maps still has no support for displaying speed limits in Germany or most of Europe. TomTom does show them.