What In The Kitten-Based Extortion…
1 hour ago
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Hey, MapQuest, Google Driections, Route 4 Me, and All the Rest
You guys really ought to figure out a way to set the directions engines so that they are not telling me how I need to get off my own frakking street. There are at least three steps, maybe more, that are so patently obvious that they should only offered to people who parrot Rush Limbaugh.
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6 comments:
That's why I never enter my starting street address – just the zip code. It still comes with 3 or 4 ignorable starting directions but at least I save the time it takes to type in a street address.
So... why don't you just set your starting address in Google or whichever to an address on a main street outside of your neighborhood?
I do wish they had a show/hide option when you go to print. Currently Google Maps allows you to toggle between text and maps on the step-by-step portion. It'd be nice if you could select a couple points - like "A" and "E" and tell it to hide between those two.
Oh man don't get me started.
At our old place, I used to have to tell people to please ignore MapQuest. For some inexplicable reason it would tell people to turn off the main road 3 miles early and wind their way up the hill, through a twisty residential neighborhood, and back down the other side of the hill, instead of just taking the main road through some beautiful terrain to our street and turning right.
The other day I began my trip with a gas stop which was not part of the grand plan and the poor dear kept telling me to turn at the next right so I could turn around about five times before I got back on track. One of the turns would have put me on a bridge that has been removed for replacement.
For years every single mapping vendor told me to take a right, then do a U-turn at the next stop light -- despite the fact that my street had a stop light, left turn lane, and curb cut through the median allowing a legal left turn there that had been there for at least a decade. 2 years ago *finally* the mapping vendors quit trying to route me the long way around to make a left turn to get to the freeway...
But things are getting better. Four years ago, I asked my Garmin GPS to take me from Darwin, CA to Panamint Springs, CA. The GPS routed me up a fictitious "Ophir Road" that went straight off a waterfall. Thankfully I already knew where Darwin Falls was located and knew that my GPS was talkin' the piss, so to speak, so I chose the actual paved route out of town and let the GPS recalculate to route me from there, but I shudder at the thought of a tourist falling prey to that, the pavement just *ends* and puts you into a sandy wash and anything that's not 4wd would be up to their hubs and stuck, and even if you do have 4wd you end up at China Hole Spring and then there's a National Park Service gate stopping you. Anyhow, I notice that in the 2009 update you're no longer routed over the waterfall, and all the web sites are updated to no longer route you over the waterfall too. Progress!
- Badtux the Mapping Penguin
MapQuest has show/hide for any step of the directions when you go to print...pretty similar to how Wicked Penguin described.
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