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Mrs C's new job has her out and about. Lots of miles across some pretty wild and remote spots. Route planning is become a chore. The problem - currently using Google maps but Google is a dick and likes to shave off 3.5 seconds by forgoing the most sensible route and using 35 miles of goat track and in the heat of the moment Mrs C is not always the best at appreciating that Google is a dick and ploughs on with 35miles of singletrack when there was a perfectly reasonable alternative.
Preferred method would be, use a nice big monitor indoors the night before to plan the route and use a bit of streetview etc. Drag the computer suggested route around so that it is actually sane and then send to phone. Only snag is that in Google maps, is that Google, the dick, reverts the carefully honed route to it's pile of poo default when you open it on the phone to use it.
Is there a better workaround that peppering the route with a but of added destinations to force what you want? Any other apps do a better job of this?
Ta
Is there a better work
Google Maps always presents you with 3 options to pick from before starting navigarion, one of which will be close to the preferred option, and the driving time for each. If it's within a minute or two I generally plump for the motorway version, which is fairly easy to spot if you are moderately familiar with the local road network.
Sadly that's not happening here. Her area is 3/4 of the land mass of Scotland so familiar is not always possible. Today's 3 preferred options involved 90 singletrack road when by adding 2 whole miles to a 40 miles route it was possible to have 90% 2 lanes and a load less stress.
Drag adjusted routes don't transfer to phone. You can add arbitrary points as waypoints instead, these will transfer. Don't use villages as the point of the village might not be on the road you're on.
I found its eagerness to use silly routes and keep changing them while you're on the move got worse when they introduced the eco routing (leaf symbol).
I want a proposed route which I can amend and agree to, then guidance to follow it. Their offering is more aimed at the more simple need of someone wanting to get to a destination.
Waze?
Waze is even worse IME, googles threshold for adding miles seems to be at least a minute. Waze once sent me on a 15 minute tour of the surrounding villages just to cut out a bit of traffic through Old Windsor. Not even cutting out the whole Runnymede to Albert Road section which was bad, no, just the bit between the Harvester and Toby Carvery. It wasn't just the backroad rat-run that all the locals use on a bad day, it went on a full tour of Virginia Water and the surrounding villages to save about 3 car lengths.
I used to use it a lot when working in TV and having to drive all over unfamiliar towns and parts of the country. Eventually gave it up after one too many awful routes.
It also seems to give really aggressive ETA's. Google must use an average speed on the road to work out your time through the traffic jam or down a country lane, Waze assumes you will be the fastest car on the road and the **** who cuts from the middle lane to the front of the queue on the sliproad, and that you'll do 60mph on the singletrack road because that's what the limit is.
Sounds like what you want is more akin to the apps motorcycle tourers use, just make sure it's picking sensible roads not the twistiest option.
I don't "think" Waze allows saved "custom" routes any better than Google maps, though I'd be chuffed if it did.
To be clear, she is armed with a proper road map too, but not necessarily common sense....
Get a proper satnav?
annoying isnt it. i hadnt twigged it did this, so used to tweak it to the route i wanted, then 'embed' it or something along those lines which gave me a link, send myself an email with the link and then open the email on my phone which automatically opened maps with the route. except it wasnt that route id saved, it was just the 'latest quickest route' which wasnt what i wanted at all.
following this with interest in case someone pops up with an answer.
Would using Google MyMaps work? (located slightly differently now on App for ref: Click on user icon > Your Places > Maps
https://www.lifewire.com/make-custom-route-on-google-maps-4126536
Get an Avtex (or Garmin - Avtex are Garmin) caravan sat nav, that should keep you to sensible roads
*edit - just Googled Caravan driving apps - Copilot might work
Maybe out of order, but can she not manage without. IIRC your in the rural NE of Scotland, so there aren't that many roads/routes to memorise?
Get a proper satnav?
Sadly, it seems any AI generated route between some of these places defaults to rat runs. The sort of road I drive every day for a few miles but super tiring for 10s of miles unless you really have to. Super rural places is not too much of a drama as there is only one or two possible options but drifting into the rural bits of Aberdeenshire creates a myriad of rat runs.
It might be a caravan app could work....
Maybe out of order, but can she not manage without. IIRC your in the rural NE of Scotland, so there aren’t that many roads/routes to memorise?
I admit she's not the best and prob could be better. But she covers the whole of Scotland to as far south as Dunfermline including the Hebs. It's quite the area. Using the standard unit....maybe 3 or 4 times the size of Wales?
Google Maps has a "prefer fuel efficient routes" setting and turning that off helps a bit.
Otherwise I still have Copilot (from back before others did offline mapping) and that lets you manually set 1-5 preference for all the different road types. It also has a routing type called "practical" that mostly does what I want.
Else it might be worth looking at one of the commercial or RV ones where you can say you're in a bigger vehicle and it'll keep you off the smaller roads unless it absolutely has to.
Copilot might work
I bought CoPilot years ago. It was very good. It basically got displaced when Google Maps was sufficiently mature, but I'm not driving round the Highlands.
Switch off “prefer fuel efficient routes” in Google - that might help?
Break it up into smaller sections? Set from Major town A to major town B, then B to C etc. Rather than rather than setting the whole route from start to finish.
Apple Maps is my preferred option now. Waze just loves those single track roads with one passing place every mile! 🤣
Drag the computer suggested route around so that it is actually sane and then send to phone. Only snag is that in Google maps, is that Google, the dick, reverts the carefully honed route to it’s pile of poo default when you open it on the phone to use it.
if you put the "points" you have after dragging it around as actual destinations on the route is should be fine - so
1) get default route
2) drag around the route with as few dots as you can
3) add these places as actual destinations (in the correct order)
should keep them in place
that said, if heavy traffic appears on your chosen route you might get scrwwd over
Google, as is their SOP, screws around with all of their apps once they get established, and render them practically useless. I used to use CoPilot, Here, and TomTom, eventually settled on TomTom to shut my team leader up and I’m still using it. It needs a subscription, but that gets you regular updates to the maps, and you can choose to only install one section of the U.K. - UK Central Northern Ireland, UK North, UK South. CoPilot was pretty good, as was Here, but that was six or seven years, and a lot of updates ago, so caveat emptor.
You can do exactly what she wants with the TomTom go app. Plot a route on your computer using the MyDrive connect website. Save it to “my Routes” in the app and it will magically upload to the go! App. For some bizarre reason you can’t get to “my routes” in the CarPlay rendition of the app, but before you connect it you can open the phone, open that folder and start the route. When you’ve loaded the route you can either just follow it or add another destination using the search function. It’s really good and now finally mimics the functionality from their high end devices.
Was scrolling through this thread in despair that no one was saying TomTom. Yes, you have to pay a subscription for the app (or buy the hardware), but it’s still head and shoulders above Google Maps, Apple Maps and Waze for getting you where you want to go in the most intelligent, fastest manner.
Worth taking a look at Here WeGo app which works well when I have used it abroad. Able to set preference for kinds of roads it uses Don't know how it performs in the wilds of NE Scotland mind
I know how frustrating this is living on the Welsh boarders . All the satnavs send us down tiny back lanes as they are 60’’s
Traditional paper map?
Just looked at a local route that I know all the apps struggle with. The eco route routes you down the smallest narrowest lanes about
The fact is no electronic system will be great in rural areas as there is less data
Are these systems clever enough yet to only use the car data travel times as opposed to the speed limits ? It’s weird that you can get them to predict journey time on any given day of the year but they still get this simple stuff wrong
What happens if you "Copy Link" and use/email that rather than sending it to the phone?
What happens if you “Copy Link” and use/email that rather than sending it to the phone?
It then recalculates the route on the phone to it's idea of sensible.
There’s an open-source multi-drop mapping site, does that help??
http://map.vroom-project.org//blockquote >
I not sure it does. The planning of the route indoors ahead of time is relatively easy - it's finding an easy way to transfer that to a phone app without something in the system thinking it knows best and using it's own algorithms to adjust it.I had a look at tomtom - I don't think from my fiddling with it it's any better. You can force a route with waypoints, but you can do that in google maps too with 'add destination' - maybe that's just as good as it gets.
All the satnavs send us down tiny back lanes as they are 60’’s
Maybe that's just it - maybe the database just sees the road by the speed limit and it doesn't know if it's a singletrack with passing places or two lanes. I always thought/assumed there was something like a strava heatmap behind the scenes and they routed people along the most used routes. Maybe there is but in very rural areas that data is not worth much.
We've had this happen - you pick a specific route on the phone in the car (connected to Car Play) and then it 'recalculates' (either because you miss a turn, or because it THINKS you've missed a turn) and suddenly it's taking you back towards the road you know if closed/flooded/busy.
Intermediate (via) destinations the only way I can think of.
Maybe there is but in very rural areas that data is not worth much.
Pretty much this. We use anonymised mobile phone data a fair bit at work in traffic modelling and monitoring (we buy it from mobile phone providers). Google use that same data (combined with a couple of other sources) to plot, in near enough real-time, traffic info, delays etc so it knows that when 2,000 phones travelling along the M6 all start moving at 5mph there's congestion and it can update all nearby phones with that route to avoid it.
However in remote areas, you don't have that density of info plus there are far fewer roads anyway and it starts to lose track of people going down a road because they have to (ie their farm is along it) vs tourists going along it cos it's a pretty road with nice views vs people who are trying to go from A->B and would rather avoid it if possible cos it's slow.
Your best option is to use a proper delivery route planner app (maybe optimised for LGV/HGV) and programme a route into it rather than relying on Google which will often pipe up with "we've found a faster route that saves 2 minutes..." and then proceeds to send you along a narrow country lanes for 5 miles.
Google Maps has a “prefer fuel efficient routes” setting and turning that off helps a bit.
It depends on what's available I guess, round here it works OK but that might be a data issue. It probably knows which lanes are crap, it just avoids things like a big motorway dogleg at 70 that's a minute quicker than the 50 direct route (e.g. M4-A34 Reading to Oxford Vs A4074 over the Chilterns.
and that you’ll do 60mph on the singletrack road because that’s what the limit is.
My previous Audi (2013) loved doing this. loved turning off a 2 lane country road onto a track for a few miles, to later re-emerge on the same road I was on.
Are these systems clever enough yet to only use the car data travel times as opposed to the speed limits ? It’s weird that you can get them to predict journey time on any given day of the year but they still get this simple stuff wrong
Can't speak for the others, but TomTom introduced this in 2008 as "IQ Routes"
"IQ Routes is the smart and efficient way to calculate routes. This innovative technology is based on actual average speed data, rather than permitted speed limits. Devices with IQ Routes plan a route by analysing all possible routes and then selecting the one that takes the least time based on recent historical data. This results in a faster route, and saves you money by significantly reducing travel time and fuel usage."
https://help.tomtom.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360013901000-About-IQ-Routes
I use Waze, and stay near Dunfermline 🙂
You can customise settings to avoid unpaved roads, and you can always preview alternative routes, even mid-journey.
The fact is no electronic system will be great in rural areas as there is less data
I've found the opposite.
Mapping doesn't need data apart from plotting the initial route which Google will then cache, full-blown apps like CoPilot already hold full UK map data. What they do need is a GPS signal and that can crap out in city centres when you're surrounded by tall buildings.
Are these systems clever enough yet to only use the car data travel times as opposed to the speed limits ? It’s weird that you can get them to predict journey time on any given day of the year but they still get this simple stuff wrong
Google/Waze surely must use travel times not speed limits and for most stuff I find their 'time to destination' scarily accurate over even long distances (if traffic conditions don't change). Except if theres a long section of country lanes - either it a) reverts to speed limits when there's not enough data or b) the local people who drive that road regularly and so contribute most of the data drive at stupidly fast and dangerous speeds. I suspect it's actually the latter. Nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they know a Singletrack road really well so they can go around that blind corner at high speed because theres never anything coming the other way.
I’ve found the opposite.
Mapping doesn’t need data apart from plotting the initial route which Google will then cache, full-blown apps like CoPilot already hold full UK map data. What they do need is a GPS signal and that can crap out in city centres when you’re surrounded by tall buildings.
I don't think he means that kind of data (4G signal). He means the anonymised data of thousands and thousands of phones in people's pockets showing the speed people are travelling (or not) and their routes of choice. And using that data to generate intelligent route guidance.
Currently in Spain and had exactly this problem. I wanted to go to a location and Google took me on a route where I wasn’t willing to risk my deposit for the rental car. Turned out there was in fact a perfectly passable road which was ignored I imagine cos it was slightly longer. Seeing as I have no local knowledge I only found this out by chance.
I wanted to go to a location and Google took me on a route where I wasn’t willing to risk my deposit for the rental car.
aye, many's the goat track its taken me down on crete, much to mrs ex-punks disgust. however, unlike you i usually went down them 😀
ive learned over the years to ignore them and stick to the 'main road' now.
It often does the same in and around Calderdale. The steep hills above Todmorden, Hebden Bridge etc are riddled with all manner of farm tracks, cobbled lanes, RUPPs/BOATs etc and Google has a really nasty habit of finding the most direct route which invariably ends up dropping you down a 1-in-5 cobbled lane barely wider than your wing mirrors.
There are often delivery vans get stuck in those little lanes for that reason.