Ask Felgall

I recently had a reason for looking up how to get to a particular location in order to be able to attend a course. I decided that the easiest way to find out how to get there was to use one of the online map services that covers my local area to get the directions on how to get there. I figured that the locally run service should be more aware of local traffic conditions than one of the big international sites.

The site offered several options that you could select from in order for it to work out the best route for you such as including or excluding toll roads, shortest distance or shortest time. I started out by requesting the route using the default settings of using toll roads where appropriate and shortest time just to see what it would come up with. The result was a route that used toll roads almost exclusively and which followed a circular route to get to the destination (obviously far from the shortest way but then it wasn’t looking for the shortest way). Unfortunately given the time of day I expected to be travelling I expected that far from being the quickest way that following that route in the middle of peak hour traffic travelling in the same direction for most of the way would probably be the slowest rather than the quickest way. The site didn’t ask what time of day I would be travelling and so obviously didn’t take differeing traffic conditions through the day into account (not that it would be easy to do so in any case and so you can’t really blame the site for that result).

Selecting to exclude toll roads gave a route that went more across the peak hour traffic rather than with it and so would probably work out to be faster and was certainly somewhat shorter. The route that it chose though has one major flaw. As it happens I am very familiar with the first half of the route that it suggested and the particular turns that it suggested to make in order to follow that route require making a right hand turn at an intersection where no right hand turns have been allowed for at least the last 20 years and probably a lot longer. You would think that the site could at least give you a route that can be followed without having to break the law. It would be understandable if that intersection had the no right turn added recently but that intersection has had that sign there since before the web existed and the web site still seems ignorant of its being there.

From what I have heard, all sites offering to give instructions on how to get from one place to another suffer from flaws and do not always return a practical result. I wonder if GPS navigation systems in cars do any better?

A couple of quick reviews for Christmas. This first one gives a one paragraph review of several of the different tools provided by Google.

Google Tools