Gregory's ServerFurthermore, 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.
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63 comments
 Here is perhaps a more telling example. I asked Google Maps to give me the directions by public transit from Park Street Station to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Locals will realize how incredibly bad this is:  @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. @siderea nope, only been in the US briefly, so it's not obvious to me @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. @whitequark @siderea I'll also note that the first time I tried to take this screenshot, Google Maps caused Firefox to bog down, and then crash. Now, who knows if that's a Firefox bug, or a graphics driver issue, but it's kind of funny when it happened, and it looks like the new Google Maps rendering may be a lot more demanding. 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. Which depending on how bad the traffic is and how fast you walk, something like a 20 to 30 minute pedestrian detour. @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 @unlambda @whitequark I know someone who works there. That is not working as intended. Bug was filed. @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 @siderea Oh, and for some more context, if you did try to roughly follow the dotted line, of course you wouldn't try to cross at the point pictured. You would naturally follow the path in the little island park up to the intersection, where there is technically a crossing. But this is the crossing; one of the most confusing intersections I have ever encountered. @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. @bipolaron Huh, this screenshot brings up a random extremely tangential question: is SEAS still *there*? I thought they had new digs across the river near the B school. (Once upon a time, this was an extremely important issue in my professional life, but then I started practicing online and it doesn't matter where my clients' lab benches are, so long as they get to somewhere in Massachusetts before the session starts.) @siderea huh, I'm not sure. It's so hard to imagine academics ever moving their labs unless enticed with ridiculous amount of money, but I guess it's been a while since I paid attention. @bipolaron Oh, ahahah, what timing: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/9/30/seas-move-to-allston/ @bipolaron @bipolaron "Relocating to Allston are the departments of applied computation, bioengineering, computer science, robotics, and virtually all the SEAS administration (much of it housed at 114 Western, adjacent to the SEC), including the office of Dean Francis (Frank) Doyle. @siderea (but it could also just be we're on different a/b test branches ) @NireBryce Oooh! I hadn't thought of that possibility. I do seem to be having some local network problems intermittently. Perhaps this will go away. @siderea This is par for the course. Google maps has been giving me wrong directions in the Boston area for more than a decade. @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. @siderea To the low signal reply that just loaded for me this was DEFINITELY not low signal as this screenshot was done on my home gigabit internet service which is a couple miles north of the location in this image. @glassbottommeg   @siderea that is a wacky route for sure, but at least you get to see the statue of Charles Sumner in MacArthur Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Charles_Sumner_(Cambridge,_Massachusetts) (If any American reading this doesn't know who Charles Sumner was, you should fix that: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Caning_of_Senator_Charles_Sumner.htm ) @siderea but maybe take a better route to the science center!🍸🙀 @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 That definitely gave the illusion that hiring an uber was the best option - otherwise you'd be stuck waiting an hour for the bus. To combat that, our transit stops have a printed list of apps which actually use the city's API. Google Maps isn't listed. |
@siderea Google maps has always been terrible for walking, which is a huge shame. Not surprised they decided to just give up. For anyone willing to download a new app I would recommend Transit and Cyclers depending on your needs. Both of them do an infinitely better job than Google maps.