7 ms·

The only thing that keeps me from completely using Google Maps over Waze is the speed trap reporting (Google Maps has a similar feature, but it’s not nearly as

The only thing that keeps me from completely using Google Maps over Waze is the speed trap reporting (Google Maps has a similar feature, but it’s not nearly as effective as Waze’s).

jeffbee 4y ago
- surfpel 4y ago
  Only if you want to die! The standard highway speed is 15mph over the speed limit here in CA. If you follow the speed limit, you’ll be going too slow to effectively maneuver or see incoming cars and increase chances of a crash. Ergo: break the law or die.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    - dang 4y ago
      We need you to stop posting abusively to HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it. I don't want to ban you—obviously, given the number of times we've already had to ask you this—but if you keep ignoring our requests, we're going to have to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 (Oct 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 (April 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 (March 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 (March 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 (Dec 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 (Oct 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 (Sept 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 (Sept 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170477 (May 2020)
  - akiselev 4y ago
    > The standard highway speed is 15mph over the speed limit here in CA. Depends entirely where in California. LA is a good 15-20 mph over, San Diego is more like 10-15 mph over, and the South Bay Area is more like 0-5 mph over (which drove me crazy coming from LA)
    - surfpel 4y ago
      Agreed more or less (lived in all 3), although South Bay can be a tossup. I've felt slow doing 80 and fast doing 70.
      - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
        Google Maps claims that much of the bay’s 101 is 55 mph. I don’t know if I believe that, but if true then it’s standard to do 20 above here.
    - carom 4y ago
      The pandemic was amazing for traffic. Flying up the 101 to SF at 95mph. (Source: from LA)
      - hunter2_ 4y ago
        That's why the Cannonball Run article has a chapter [0] dedicated to the pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#During_the_COVID-19_Pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#Durin...
  - wilg 4y ago
    Is there any evidence of this?
- Minor49er 4y ago
  These days, there are more drivers and fewer cops to make the boogeyman of a random speed trap seem like a possibility. Showing that there is a cop ahead would work better, I imagine. One of the reasons why people drive recklessly is because they don't think any cops are around to bust them
- Xcelerate 4y ago
  Yes, I considered it
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nichos 4y ago
  Because all laws are rational and make sense.
  - Steltek 4y ago
    One law that does make sense is that drivers should not be playing with their phone while operating a car. Speed and distracted driving are leading factors in fatal crashes. Car crashes are leading cause of non-disease related death in the US (after guns and suicide).
- worewood 4y ago
  Try complying when you live in a corrupt country and the legal speed drops from 60 to 50 just on that specific 10 meters conveniently by a speed camera
dcdc123 4y ago
I’m a nomad and have spent the last two+ years traveling the us. Google maps routing has degraded significantly in that time. I was really happy with it at first but it’s gotten worse over time. Now I dread using it and know it is going to fail to inform me correctly about which lane to be in, will pick odd routes (especially when not on the highway), and most annoying of all is they have added all sorts of phantom merges which often obscure the real next turn/exit until the last second because there is a nonexistent merge on the map.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  Try Here Maps. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Supports offline as well.
- albrewer 4y ago
  > they have added all sorts of phantom merges which often obscure the real next turn/exit until the last second because there is a nonexistent merge on the map This is the thing that I hate the most. It wouldn't be so bad if they kept a zoom level where I could see what's coming up, but they zoom in super tight until the phantom merge point is passed. If I'm traveling 60 mph and I have to cut across 3 lanes of busy traffic in less than a tenth of a mile, I'd like to have a fucking heads up. When cruising on the interstate, I'd like to know my exit number without having to scroll past all the instances where the number of lanes changes on my way there. My Garmin GPS from 2007 had a better UX than this.
btdk 4y ago
I fear that this will end up ruining my day. I'm used to the speedtrap, speed limits and general crowd sourced alerts in Waze. I remember seing this in google maps, but it disappeared again. I don't know if my location (Denmark) has something to say about that? That being said, the estimates that waze give me, especially for sudden accidents, are way off. I'm told it's better in the Copenhagen area, due to more users on the road, but where I live, it's almost non-existant.
mtgx 4y ago
AareyBaba 4y ago
I recently decided to give Apple Maps driving directions a try and was surprised to find that it notified me of a driving hazard (a trashcan on the road) in my lane a few seconds before I would have hit it. Does anyone know how they detect something like that ?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Someone called in the cops, who have interfaces with radio stations and other warning systems for road dangers. A local radio station here in Munich claims a latency time of mere seconds as soon as the police knows about it [1]. [1] https://www.radioarabella.de/geisterfahrer-wir-warnen-sie-in-echtzeit-vor-falschfahrern-429539/ https://www.radioarabella.de/geisterfahrer-wir-warnen-sie-in...
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  I think this is the dumbest feature imaginable - maps is aware there is an obstacle in the road and so it pops a toast up on the screen, attracting my attention to a timed button for me to confirm or cancel ??
- bm-rf 4y ago
  A user probably sent the report further down the road. Hazard reporting should pin the location right when you pull up the list of options, I think Waze does this when you click the report button. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212226 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212226
mdip 4y ago
That's it for me, too. And damn it's effective. About two years ago I had an opportunity to run a "for fun" experiment. My family and another family went on vacation together but I had to come home a couple of days early due to business travel. Because of vehicle sizes, I ended up taking the other car home -- which was a small luxury SUV with a high-end radar detector ... somewhere inside the damn thing[1]. I had Waze up. For whatever reason, between two different states, the roads were teaming with traffic enforcement. When I stopped to fill up, I grabbed a small notebook and a pen and kept score: Radar/Waze with ticks under "Cop Missed", "Cop Found", "False Positive". The radar was worthless. It had lower false-positives than I'd expected (I remember those things going off all the time for nothing) but when it went off, it went off too late. It missed more than half of them. Waze, on the other hand, had very few false positives. I suspect some that I marked "false positive" were really me failing to see the police officer[2]. This was "8-hours of highway (non-turnpike/toll)" and there was a police officer every 5 miles (I went 2, maybe 3 pages in tick marks on a hand-sized spiral-bound $0.99 gas station notepad). I don't even know that I bothered calculating everything out completely. For one, Waze did not miss a single speed trap that entire drive. Where I live (metro to a major mid-west city), it's rare that I'm the first reporter or that I see a cop that Waze isn't alerting me about already. Beyond police, the reports for disabled vehicles (by law you must move one lane over where I live) is very helpful for both "ticket avoidance" and safety (if you care enough to follow the rules). I prefer the Google Maps interface -- and generally everything else about it over Waze, but I use Waze 99.9% of the time and for every drive. I have it setup to not speak the directions because much of the time I'm traveling to places that I am very familiar with the routes (I might follow a suggestion over my own preference, though, because "Waze tends to be more right"). I use it, entirely, for the social reporting features. Though Maps, at one point, added this (is it still there?) it wasn't even close to the quality of that provided by Waze. I'm really hoping they "put the social features into Maps" and I'll switch to maps or "move the UI more toward Maps in Waze" and I'll continue using Waze. [0] For context, I'm not an aggressive driver ... I don't drive that much any longer as it is so I tend to be a lot more cautious these days. But it's way too easy to not notice a 10-15 MPH speed limit change accidentally and driving laws are among the small set of laws that are more often broken unintentionally, than intentionally. [1] I would have had no idea what the insane beeping was all about but it was a brand that a friend of mine owned growing up and I recognized the tone ... but he had it installed in a manner that it you'd never know there was one in the car except for the sound (they're illegal in Canada which they traveled to frequently). It was a very expensive model outfitted with the latest Radar Detector Detector Detector Detector Detector (odd or even number, I can't remember). I had no idea how to silence it so I was afraid I'd get pulled over and guarantee myself a ticket for having it. [2] Where I live, on-ramps make great speed traps. If positioned just so, you can't see them until they're behind you, and you can't see them in your passenger mirror at all if it's a typical mirror/aimed the way most drivers aim them -- requiring you to turn your head to locate them (something you're probably not in the habit of doing while chilling at highway speeds).

The only thing that keeps me from completely using Google Maps over Waze is the speed trap reporting (Google Maps has a similar feature, but it’s not nearly as effective as Waze’s).

jeffbee 4y ago

surfpel 4y ago
Only if you want to die! The standard highway speed is 15mph over the speed limit here in CA. If you follow the speed limit, you’ll be going too slow to effectively maneuver or see incoming cars and increase chances of a crash. Ergo: break the law or die.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  - dang 4y ago
    We need you to stop posting abusively to HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it. I don't want to ban you—obviously, given the number of times we've already had to ask you this—but if you keep ignoring our requests, we're going to have to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 (Oct 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 (April 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 (March 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 (March 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 (Dec 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 (Oct 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 (Sept 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 (Sept 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170477 (May 2020)
- akiselev 4y ago
  > The standard highway speed is 15mph over the speed limit here in CA. Depends entirely where in California. LA is a good 15-20 mph over, San Diego is more like 10-15 mph over, and the South Bay Area is more like 0-5 mph over (which drove me crazy coming from LA)
  - surfpel 4y ago
    Agreed more or less (lived in all 3), although South Bay can be a tossup. I've felt slow doing 80 and fast doing 70.
    - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      Google Maps claims that much of the bay’s 101 is 55 mph. I don’t know if I believe that, but if true then it’s standard to do 20 above here.
  - carom 4y ago
    The pandemic was amazing for traffic. Flying up the 101 to SF at 95mph. (Source: from LA)
    - hunter2_ 4y ago
      That's why the Cannonball Run article has a chapter [0] dedicated to the pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#During_the_COVID-19_Pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#Durin...
- wilg 4y ago
  Is there any evidence of this?
Minor49er 4y ago
These days, there are more drivers and fewer cops to make the boogeyman of a random speed trap seem like a possibility. Showing that there is a cop ahead would work better, I imagine. One of the reasons why people drive recklessly is because they don't think any cops are around to bust them
Xcelerate 4y ago
Yes, I considered it
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nichos 4y ago
Because all laws are rational and make sense.
- Steltek 4y ago
  One law that does make sense is that drivers should not be playing with their phone while operating a car. Speed and distracted driving are leading factors in fatal crashes. Car crashes are leading cause of non-disease related death in the US (after guns and suicide).
worewood 4y ago
Try complying when you live in a corrupt country and the legal speed drops from 60 to 50 just on that specific 10 meters conveniently by a speed camera

dcdc123 4y ago

I’m a nomad and have spent the last two+ years traveling the us. Google maps routing has degraded significantly in that time. I was really happy with it at first but it’s gotten worse over time. Now I dread using it and know it is going to fail to inform me correctly about which lane to be in, will pick odd routes (especially when not on the highway), and most annoying of all is they have added all sorts of phantom merges which often obscure the real next turn/exit until the last second because there is a nonexistent merge on the map.

Sunspark 4y ago
Try Here Maps. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Supports offline as well.
albrewer 4y ago
> they have added all sorts of phantom merges which often obscure the real next turn/exit until the last second because there is a nonexistent merge on the map This is the thing that I hate the most. It wouldn't be so bad if they kept a zoom level where I could see what's coming up, but they zoom in super tight until the phantom merge point is passed. If I'm traveling 60 mph and I have to cut across 3 lanes of busy traffic in less than a tenth of a mile, I'd like to have a fucking heads up. When cruising on the interstate, I'd like to know my exit number without having to scroll past all the instances where the number of lanes changes on my way there. My Garmin GPS from 2007 had a better UX than this.

btdk 4y ago

I fear that this will end up ruining my day. I'm used to the speedtrap, speed limits and general crowd sourced alerts in Waze. I remember seing this in google maps, but it disappeared again. I don't know if my location (Denmark) has something to say about that? That being said, the estimates that waze give me, especially for sudden accidents, are way off. I'm told it's better in the Copenhagen area, due to more users on the road, but where I live, it's almost non-existant.

mtgx 4y ago

AareyBaba 4y ago

I recently decided to give Apple Maps driving directions a try and was surprised to find that it notified me of a driving hazard (a trashcan on the road) in my lane a few seconds before I would have hit it. Does anyone know how they detect something like that ?

mschuster91 4y ago
Someone called in the cops, who have interfaces with radio stations and other warning systems for road dangers. A local radio station here in Munich claims a latency time of mere seconds as soon as the police knows about it [1]. [1] https://www.radioarabella.de/geisterfahrer-wir-warnen-sie-in-echtzeit-vor-falschfahrern-429539/ https://www.radioarabella.de/geisterfahrer-wir-warnen-sie-in...
jazzyjackson 4y ago
I think this is the dumbest feature imaginable - maps is aware there is an obstacle in the road and so it pops a toast up on the screen, attracting my attention to a timed button for me to confirm or cancel ??
bm-rf 4y ago
A user probably sent the report further down the road. Hazard reporting should pin the location right when you pull up the list of options, I think Waze does this when you click the report button. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212226 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212226

mdip 4y ago

That's it for me, too. And damn it's effective. About two years ago I had an opportunity to run a "for fun" experiment. My family and another family went on vacation together but I had to come home a couple of days early due to business travel. Because of vehicle sizes, I ended up taking the other car home -- which was a small luxury SUV with a high-end radar detector ... somewhere inside the damn thing[1]. I had Waze up. For whatever reason, between two different states, the roads were teaming with traffic enforcement. When I stopped to fill up, I grabbed a small notebook and a pen and kept score: Radar/Waze with ticks under "Cop Missed", "Cop Found", "False Positive". The radar was worthless. It had lower false-positives than I'd expected (I remember those things going off all the time for nothing) but when it went off, it went off too late. It missed more than half of them. Waze, on the other hand, had very few false positives. I suspect some that I marked "false positive" were really me failing to see the police officer[2]. This was "8-hours of highway (non-turnpike/toll)" and there was a police officer every 5 miles (I went 2, maybe 3 pages in tick marks on a hand-sized spiral-bound $0.99 gas station notepad). I don't even know that I bothered calculating everything out completely. For one, Waze did not miss a single speed trap that entire drive. Where I live (metro to a major mid-west city), it's rare that I'm the first reporter or that I see a cop that Waze isn't alerting me about already. Beyond police, the reports for disabled vehicles (by law you must move one lane over where I live) is very helpful for both "ticket avoidance" and safety (if you care enough to follow the rules). I prefer the Google Maps interface -- and generally everything else about it over Waze, but I use Waze 99.9% of the time and for every drive. I have it setup to not speak the directions because much of the time I'm traveling to places that I am very familiar with the routes (I might follow a suggestion over my own preference, though, because "Waze tends to be more right"). I use it, entirely, for the social reporting features. Though Maps, at one point, added this (is it still there?) it wasn't even close to the quality of that provided by Waze. I'm really hoping they "put the social features into Maps" and I'll switch to maps or "move the UI more toward Maps in Waze" and I'll continue using Waze. [0] For context, I'm not an aggressive driver ... I don't drive that much any longer as it is so I tend to be a lot more cautious these days. But it's way too easy to not notice a 10-15 MPH speed limit change accidentally and driving laws are among the small set of laws that are more often broken unintentionally, than intentionally. [1] I would have had no idea what the insane beeping was all about but it was a brand that a friend of mine owned growing up and I recognized the tone ... but he had it installed in a manner that it you'd never know there was one in the car except for the sound (they're illegal in Canada which they traveled to frequently). It was a very expensive model outfitted with the latest Radar Detector Detector Detector Detector Detector (odd or even number, I can't remember). I had no idea how to silence it so I was afraid I'd get pulled over and guarantee myself a ticket for having it. [2] Where I live, on-ramps make great speed traps. If positioned just so, you can't see them until they're behind you, and you can't see them in your passenger mirror at all if it's a typical mirror/aimed the way most drivers aim them -- requiring you to turn your head to locate them (something you're probably not in the habit of doing while chilling at highway speeds).