@siderea the ride hailing service connection was a thing in Sweden before too. Now I don't now if they rolled it back or if I just disabled it and ot stayed disabled.
We still have walking directions for connections :)
@siderea I noticed this as well when I tried to find out whether there was a pedestrian crossing at a particular spot in a junction the other day. Completely useless.
@beandev I just rechecked the same example I used previously, Park Street to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and it's now showing a pedestrian path. Maybe the bug reports that were submitted got it fixed? Maybe we're being A/B tested? Maybe that's some sort of failure mode that happens when my upstream internet is flaking out? Many possibilities.
@siderea
I work in cloud engineering and I can say that there are millions of problems that could explain this. If the link between public transportation and footpath routing no longer worked, then it was not such a bad fallback to offer at least something than not working at all.
It would be helpful if one had a status page for such problems. More transparency would make sense.
@siderea Google Maps is doing the same thing on my iPhone. Until very recently, it would precisely lay out the walking route required to get to transit, but I get the same bullshit arc now. Citymapper used to offer the trebuchet option, but Google has made it the default.
@siderea
see it in the Netherlands too. That's a pretty strange change, especially when it can still plan walking routes separately. I wonder what motivates it.
@siderea
I suspect that walkers frequently diverted from their guidance, as shortcuts across parking lots and lawns are possible to make for a person but not for a corporate product to recommend.
The "get there how you can" approach might show the correspondingly faster speed now that those more circuitous legal routes aren't constraining the path.
@bhawthorne Dumbass, I used that to render a convenient example of the behavior of the software. Would you kindly delete this and fuck all the way off?
@siderea Deleted. And thanks so much for asking so kindly and for reminding me yet again of the cognitive deficits long Covid has brought me. Dumbass? I suppose so. Fucking all the way off now. I hope you feel really good about making a sick old man who was trying to be helpful feel even more depressed and worthless. You’ve done your good deed for the day I guess.
And you'll notice, even on that example, the resolution is not fine enough that the cross streets are named. The only thing that makes these directions followable is that Kirkland ends at the Science Center; if Kirkland continued, the cross street you are to turn on to get to the Science Center is not named on the map.
The other interesting change that just happened is now searching for public transit directions automatically includes solutions that involve ride hailing services. Apparently if the walk between a bus stop and a destination is sufficiently far – I don't know what the distance threshold is – instead of showing you that walk and including its duration in the time estimate, it just includes a ride hailing call, and the estimate of the duration of that ride hailing trip.
@siderea I just tried this and it didn't even show that I could walk 12 mins and take 1 bus to get home until I turned the ride hailing option off. Instead it told me to take a bus to the light rail which doesn't go near where I live and then take a ride hailing service. If I had just called a Lyft it would be a 30 min ride straight home instead of the bus, light rail, plus 20 min Lyft like why is it so convoluted? Why wouldn't it automatically show all options?
These changes are, in case it wasn't obvious, extremely not good.
I'm guessing that whoever authorized these changes has never actually used public transit? Or perhaps never relied on it.
This may come as a huge shock to the people at Google, but a very large percentage of those who use public transit do so not because it is convenient or nice, because it is often neither, but because they are poor. And they can't just be whipping out their wallets to hire an Uber or a Lyft.
Furthermore, because this is America, an unfortunate lot of people stuck being poor wound up that way because they are disabled, and it matters a lot to them how long it takes to walk from a bus stop to a destination. Heretofore, Google Maps was a tool that allowed such people to find out what the walk would be between a public transit stop and their ultimate destination.
@siderea I remember years back abandoning Google Maps for transit when I left the US, because the data it was working off was extremely limited.
A big task for local public transit apps is to know which APIs to pull from for a given region - what municipal & private organizations actually operate here and where they publish their data.
At the time, Google Maps seemed to mainly be aware of the US-based firms (Uber etc), plus a small handful of bus lines they manually imported.
@siderea One from Seattle I got the other day. It used to show a dotted walking route that went along the crosswalk locations (the stripes of gray) but now just shows a straight diagonal. Across one of the most dangerous streets in town. I don’t think anyone would actually follow this route but it’s baffling to present it this way as it elides the need for two crossings of streets.
@whitequark I don't know if you're local or not. I've just spent the last 15 minutes trying to figure out how to explain or illustrate through Google Street view what the terrain is that that... lack of a set of directions... turn someone loose on.
There is an abundance of perfectly safe pedestrian routes for that path. Also, there's something a lot like a highway on-ramp in the middle of it. That is not indicated on that map.
@whitequark@siderea This view shows what I think is the worst street crossing from those directions. You'd be crossing in the foreground here, from right to left. Once you've jumped over the fence and down into the roadway at the blind curve, made it past the cars emerging from a dark tunnel, you hit a retaining wall that keeps you from getting out of the roadway. If you try to bypass that, the road has a blind curve so the traffic has less chance to see you.
@whitequark There is no line of sight to the safe walking paths from the subway head house those directions have a pedestrian emerging from.
As a consequence, tourists emerging from that head house en route to, e.g. the Harvard Museum of Natural History, sometimes think to get to their destination they have to somehow get across that thing that is like a highway on ramp... the hard way.
@whitequark@siderea Here's a Google Street View image of about where the dotted line in that screenshot crosses the street.
And it's even worse because right here the road is coming out from a tunnel under a pedestrian plaza where you can cross with ease; but that is not at all apparent on the map, it just looks like road the whole way.
@unlambda@whitequark@siderea I'd note the curved dotted line is not supposed to be your projected path. It's a :shrug: response that indicates you're on your own. No, it's not great in any measure. At least since we moved to WA three years ago, Google Maps has done that consistently for walking directions. It's been a PITA when we go into downtown Seattle and are going to park and walk because I have to fiddle with the options to get a walking path.
@rivetgeek@whitequark@siderea But the confusing thing about it is that it's not just a single "shrug" dotted line; it's not a single segment, there's some kind of waypoint in between.
And it's a regression; Google Maps is capable of generating plausible walking directions for this route, and I believe that it used to do so for transit directions (though it's been a while since I've used transit directions, moved out of the city several years back), but it now seems to just give the "shrug."
That's because the two different hops are on two different planes.
The first hop is the pedestrian path inside the station, from the train platform to the surface, and then the second hop is on the surface from the headhouse of the station to the destination.
@siderea@rivetgeek@whitequark Ah, right. So they do have some notion of pedestrian routing; the question is why they don't continue to do the pedestrian routing after exiting the headhouse? It feels like this may be some kind of limiting of the route complexity; they've changed a constant somewhere where it will just give the "shrug" rather than trying to route you if the route goes over a certain complexity.
@whitequark@siderea It's even more puzzling because Google Maps is perfectly capable of generating reasonable-ish walking directions for the same start point and destination if you ask for walking directions. I just have no idea what's going on with the dotted line in the transit directions; it's not even just a single "dotted line to your destination", it seems to have a waypoint that explicitly leads you astray.
I'll note that one of the reasons that path is different from the other, is that you asked for directions from "Harvard Square" or maybe "Harvard Square Station", right?
If you're actually coming in on a northbound train, it saves you about a block's worth of walking to use the exit that the bad Google Maps public transit directions use, instead of walking back down the platform, and down the ramp, and then up to the surface in Harvard Square proper, as per that.
I'd argue that the correct directions, if you're coming from a northbound red line train, are to use the north head house to exit on the east side of Mass Ave, next to Harvard Yard, and just stay on the damn sidewalk. You have to trust the process, but it will deliver you unimpeded directly to the Science Center plaza.
And it has the advantage of being a path that works even with Harvard has locked the gates to Harvard Yard (e.g. around graduation time.)
The problem is it looks like it doesn't work. It curves around the wrong way, and all you can see is the road dropping down and forming a massive obstacle. There's no visual confirmation that the sidewalk crosses to the other side. So the obvious thought, looking at a map, is "Oh I suppose I have to cross the street here" – the street being four lanes of Mass Ave at its worst. And then you discover you have to cross back the other way on the far side of that mess.
@siderea@whitequark Yeah. I guess I've always just gotten off at the north head house and then gone through Harvard Yard; I supposed I've never been there when the gates are locked. But yes, this is a very complex place to navigate through, and one where good walking directions could help a lot, and it's very easy to get misled and take a route that is circuitous at best and could be dangerous if you don't navigate it carefully.
@siderea@whitequark Yeah, I just put it where I saw the end of your transit route; at Harvard Square. I hadn't realized that Google Maps was actually doing one smart thing, which is telling you to get out at the northern head house, but then failing to route you past that.
If I look at Google Maps in my browser, it even gives you fairly detailed instructions within the station, and then just gives up once you exit the head house. It's weird where it gives up on walking directions.
@whitequark All you have to do to get to the Harvard Museum of Natural History from that exit from the subway, is just stay on the sidewalk, and follow its curve around Harvard Yard. Easy peasy.
That takes you to a pleasant courtyard that doesn't exist on that map, and which sits on top of the thing that is like a highway on ramp. There is no evidence that this thing exists on that map.
@whitequark this all has the additional exacerbation that it's Harvard Goddamn University. I really can't overstate the extent of lost tourists, lost new students, lost parents, lost visiting scholars, wandering around this part of the world lost, on foot, and straying into traffic.
@siderea this sucks. Thanks for sharing.
It doesn’t solve the Google Maps issue, but I have found the Transit App to be a pretty robust option that seems to have a less sketchy business model https://transitapp.com/
@siderea
maps does this for me when my Wi-Fi signal is terrible but isn't terrible enough to switch over to data, so I wonder if it's stuck in offline mode
(but it could also just be we're on different a/b test branches )
@siderea@NireBryce
This, yes. When I'm using offline maps, gmaps will generate driving directions, but not walking or transit directions. I could almost forgive it for the transit directions, since usually it tries to adjust for whether they're running on time, but lack of offline walking directions is just rude.
@AlexxKay people keep saying things like that, and maybe I've just been watching too many Simone Biles videos, but it looks really clear to me that there's some sort of accelerator vault springy pad there, because it's little hop, big jump.
@siderea, so these changes have not come to Google in Germany yet.
What I was wondering, when spending more thoughts on automation of driving, was if it would be a thing to use routing to favour certain needs that might not be the needs of the passengers exactly but of advertisement partners.
Now I am wondering if it is just a more promising business case for Google to support ride haling rather than walking.
@siderea wow, that looks horrible. Why would one not use CityMapper for transit routes anyway?
Google Maps was already the worse solution, they just went steps backwards. Yeah, a product manager or product owner should have familiarity with the use cases...
@c_chep Huh, I hadn't heard of CityMapper. It looks pretty cool, but it's already giving me one absurd answer. If I'm already at Park Street Station, and I'm trying to get somewhere on the Orange Line, the only circumstances in which the right answer is "Walk to Chinatown Station" are when your destination is Chinatown Station or Downtown Crossing Station is for some bizarre reason closed.
@siderea ah, interesting. Rarely been let down by them so far (including US trips) except in cities they don't serve.
Good to see everyone has work ahead
@siderea
Interesting, I plotted the same route in Google maps (I think the latest version) on my Samsung Galaxy, and got this, which I think looks better, but I'm not a local so not sure if this is still bad or not
@siderea yeah it's very obviously an ideology-made-policy, hypernormalization style, of some fucking techies who would rather call an uber than walk a few blocks. they're everywhere in SF and they contribute to the car dependence paradigm here that creates traffic where none would otherwise be, blocks bike lanes, and ultimately kills more pedestrians and cyclists yearly.
And there's also the fact that you have no idea how long it's going to take a ride hailing service to get to you. So, so much for using Google Maps for estimating how long to leave to get somewhere on time by public transit.
@siderea This particular aspect of the change (including ride-hailing services) smells like absolutely classic #enshittification, in the “make more money by making the end user experience worse” sense. I'd lay good odds that they are getting a kickback from Uber/Lyft for it.
Add comment