Google Maps is Degrading

[turbopilot]

There is a lot of chatter on the web about this mainstay for roads navigation degrading in the last year. I have been driving a lot this year and Google Maps is just not performing like it once did. My first big experience with this was last July. I set up a trip to take the LightShip back to EAA AirVenture. I plotted the trip the night before and checked that the highways I planned to take were clear. The next morning before departure I check again, then launched. Twenty miles from my house on a normally busy Arizona state highway (AZ89) I hit a road block. I talked to the workers at the block and was told there was a fatal motorcycle accident on the highway 12 hours before. I looked at Google and no indication of the problem.

Since then I have run into various versions of the same thing. Last week a busy US highway (US-168) crossing the Navajo Nation was closed with a flood washout. This is the only highway available to exit Arizona to the Northeast through the 4 corners area. That closure was not registered on Google for 7 days. I you plotted a trip through that area Google would take you right through like it was open. Anyone that crosses the Navajo Nation regularly knows there is rarely an option for a closed road.

So what's happening? I did a few searches and the best I can find out is that Google has pulled a lot of human support for Google Maps and is now relying on signals from moving vehicles almost entirely. If you ask Google AI (Gemini) it freely admits it has changed its model for managing traffic awareness. It even suggested that if you want "timely" information you should consult with one of the 50 state "511" pages. Bottom line do not count on Google Maps for timely information.

 

[Rosy]

I think if traffic is more of a concern than the route itself, most folks use Waze.

 

[MemoriesByTheMile]

We have noticed that Google won’t have road closures but Apple Maps will have them, even when they occurred just an hour or two earlier.

 

[DennisT]

Appreciate the info since I have been using Google Maps to navigate in the toad. Maybe time to setup the second Garmin we have for use in there.

The live traffic option on our Garmin (live traffic through the phone app and connected to the Garmin gps) has always worked well for us.

Suggests routes around things that have happened or traffic etc and, from what I could tell, was near real time.

 

[TheLooks]

My wife has a real problem with Gmaps offering a redirection and then implementing it if you are not looking at the phone. When it says stay on Route xx for 175 miles and you stop monitoring it, and it changes the route without your input, it is a problem. With our Garmin RV795, it takes us places that make no sense. We drove all around in NY to a state park when we could have driven straight to it on another road. I left by that road and there was no issue, an accident would have been reported if it was our main route going in....or something. Several times in the 3000+ trip last summer it took us places I could not explain. I am familiar enough with New England to know when something is not right. But at the end of the day we got where we were going.
Last weekend we drove to Sandusky Ohio and had 3 gps phones running. They switched back and forth between 2 phones agreeing and 1 not all the way there. All running Gmaps.

 

[SGilbert]

I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not.

Waze is owned by Google and uses Google Maps. It goes well beyond Google Maps, however, adding traffic, accidents, police, speed traps, road debris, etc.

There is no reason to use Google Maps for any travel when Waze does most all!
I heard that Waze will be using vehicle stats (RVs) in the near future. Lets hope it is sooner than later.

 

[turbopilot]

I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not.

Waze is crowd sourced data that has always been more robust for traffic conditions, but it is not curated, it is crowd sourced. Better than nothing which is what is going on with Google Maps. Google Maps is a superior "mapping" application to anything out there for travel on the highway. Active curation of fast changing traffic is the tough part that apparently Google has stopped doing.

I have been using Google Maps since introduction in 2005. It has always been a free service, something we have to consider. Curating traffic conditions on a map is labor intensive. Google is now regressing to using signals from moving clients to render highway conditions as green, yellow or red. No humans involved for this curation and it is clearly better than nothing.

Where it fails big time is on long stretches of secondary roads with a hard closure but with local access permitted. In this case Google sees traffic moving locally on the road, paints it green, but has no way of knowing the road is closed to thru traffic in the middle. That is the trap I have fallen into twice this Summer.

 

[Rosy]

I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not.

Waze is owned by Google and uses Google Maps. It goes well beyond Google Maps, however, adding traffic, accidents, police, speed traps, road debris, etc.

There is no reason to use Google Maps for any travel when Waze does most all!
I heard that Waze will be using vehicle stats (RVs) in the near future. Lets hope it is sooner than later.

Gmaps works fine for me. If there's anything I don't need, it's another app on my phone.

 

[Phillbo]

Is there another option when using android auto?

 

[SGilbert]

Is there another option when using android auto?

Several.
RV Life Pro is pretty good, especially regarding notifications as to where you cannot go based on your Vehicle specs. However, it uses Here mapping, which isn't the greatest.

Several trucker's apps also, but I cannot comment on them.
There may be others for Androids, but, as an iPhone user, I wouldn't know.

 

[rjshiflet49]

I always use Waze - I find it by far the most up-to-date and accurate of any of them (Google Maps, Apple Maps and Waze). Yes, it's crowd-sourced but over the past 14-15 years that I've used it, there seems to be a sense of pride in the people using it - they want accuracy. And, there are checks/balances as far as changing speed limits on roads, etc.

 

[Neal]

I use a Garmin RV 890 which is connected to my phone for live traffic updates, reroute suggestions, etc. In my dash radio I use CarPlay to connect my phone to Waze for backup and crowd source info on hazards, police, etc. Waze can go dark on you if it loses cellular/internet.

 

[Underboss]

Garmin 1090, Waze on my ipad and RV Trip Wizard GPS on my Apple Car Play. I cover all my bases. Not sold on the RV Trip GPS as I has tried to send me on tangents that the Garmin has not.

 

[turbopilot]

When traveling long distances with an RV, I think there are really two separate jobs that we tend to lump together as “navigation.” The first is basic navigation—getting from Point A to Point B and providing turn-by-turn guidance. The second is tactical route planning: continuously looking well ahead of the vehicle for developing congestion, accidents, construction, road closures, severe weather, high winds, or other changing conditions, then deciding whether the planned route still makes sense. For an RV traveler covering hundreds of miles in a day, that second function can be just as important as navigation itself. What I increasingly want from a mapping system is not simply accurate directions for the next few miles, but a strategic view far enough down the road to recognize a developing problem early enough to do something useful about it.

Right now no one application is doing both jobs. Ironically, Google Maps just implemented AI services in the latest version that promises to provide that "look ahead" strategic planning function but in practice I have not seen this work. I do think the ultimate solution is an AI agent working through these navigation apps that is looking ahead constantly in real time at all the sources of road information (crowd sourced, traffic movement like Google Maps, state and local 511 sites) and aggregating it into real time analysis is the answer.

I have been using ChatGPT "Live Chat" in the IOS application on recent trips for this function. I set up Google Maps for navigation then activate Live Chat on ChatGPT and leave it on. Rolling down the highway I simply give ChatGPT the mileage marker and highway number and ask it to look down the road by polling various traffic sources on the internet. This works.

Two problems with this approach. I have not had success getting it running in the background to speak up when something new happens down the road. And all these AI agents are throttled by Apple to look at your actual location. ChatGPT is location aware by general area but not exact location. But since ChatGPT is context aware the next interaction with the AI agent carries the history of previous reports forward. For instance if you ask ChatGPT to look down the road and it tells you about a problem in 100 miles, the next time you ask ChatGPT a question you simply say "Update me on that last traffic problem" and it does just that.

 

[TheLooks]

I like that approach. I used the Garmin Drive app as it was supposed to update us on live traffic info. It did not. And I drove up to a low bridge...to low, in Ohio. I think we will be running Waze on our next trip. I used to use it and can't stand it downloading a million icons for POI's along the way. One of my changes is to not be wound up about not getting there in the most perfect way possible. We are traveling less distance so we can be more relaxed.