Comment by leblancfg
13 hours ago
Great idea and demo. My main gripe when using Google Maps in the car is lack of information about the next turns — when do I change lanes, and to which one? This could be natively addressed here, especially if the blue navigation line was a little thinner and showed which lane(s) the driver needs to take.
I find these comments fascinating. Do people just switch off and become completely incapable of using the road when using GPS? You can use navigation and your ability to use roads, read road signs etc at the same time!
This comment confuses me a bit because Google Maps (at least in the US, in my experience) is really great about telling you what lane to be in.
> Google Maps (at least in the US, in my experience) is really great about telling you what lane to be in.
Having recently driven in Boston[1], the problem is that Google Maps tells you what lane you need to be in when the route divergence happens... it doesn't tell you what lane you need to be in to get to that lane.
So I would see guidance like be in the first or second lane (from the left) to make this left turn and all seemed well since I was in the second lane from the left. Then two more lanes merged in from the left and I had to get over two lanes and ended up on a two mile onramp for the highway to New Hampshire.
I see the same things locally, but it's not as obviously bad because I'm familiar with the local highways and also most of the local highways aren't as space constrained so there's almost always plenty of time to merge.
[1] I don't recommend it... we should have driven to the airport and returned our car and taken transit back to our hotel
I need to know what lane I'll need to be in next so I can plan in advance.
Yeah, there’s a tendency not to know with sufficient time, especially with heavy traffic.
Not every road owner in the world has provided how many lanes a road has. To tell you which lane to stay in, it need to know how many there are!
Where in the world are these road owners, and do they really eve provide this kind of information to mapping companies?
Here in the States, most of the roads are "owned" by the people and our various thousands of governmental jurisdictions do not tell anyone about these kinds of details in any uniform way.
We just kind of figure it out on our own.
That's also where this map would help, it can definitely degrade gracefully. If I know I have two right-hand turns coming, I can take the decision for myself.
This information is all derived from overhead (satellite and aerial) imagery combined with street level imagery (like from Google street view). No road owners required.
It fails the task as often as not on large East Coast highways. Not nearly as bad on the West Coast.