I'd like to see a review of how the various navigation apps do in situations with unusually heavy, unusually widespread traffic, such as when people were trying to go home after the 2017 total eclipse in the US.
I was using Waze when leaving Madras, Oregon, after the eclipse heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington. It suggested a route that would bypass a couple miles of slow traffic, but the road it sent me down was a dirt road with a periodic undulation in it that caused massive vibration, and my car and the two or three others that were on it were throwing up so much dust it was very hard to see. I turned around and went back to the main route and put up with the slow traffic.
A friend of mine was also leaving Madras, but heading to California. He was using Google. It also was giving some poor route advice. Here's what he told me when we compared notes of our trips home:
> Google kept sending us onto logging roads: we bailed on the first when we were told to turn onto a non-existent road; we bailed on the second when a van came out and told us that ~5 cars were stuck axle-deep in mud; we bailed on the third when we got to a sign informing us that we were about to enter an off-road-vehicle trail.
I'd also like to see a review of how the various cell phone companies handled it. Both me and my friend are on T-Mobile, and something like 90% of the text messages we tried to exchange were either lost or delivered hours late. I think we managed one or two short voice calls. Most voice calls either did not connect, or on occasion would connect but only one of us could hear the other.
My own experience, returning from western Kentucky to the Chicago area, was interesting in the "may you live in interesting times" sense. From the outset I decided to take back roads where feasible. Traveling through rural southern Illinois, I noticed small parades of cars forming, and Google Maps wanted to put me on Route 1, which turned into a massive parade of cars.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile in southern Illinois leaves a lot to be desired, and so dynamic routing was iffy at best unless I was near an interstate. I decided to head off on county blacktops and secondary state routes, sans data coverage, and made good time in spite of storms. I got on I-57 near Effingham, and traffic went smoothly until I approached Champaign-Urbana, where my ETA steadily racked upward as I got closer. A quick peek showed lots of trouble ahead around Rantoul.
So, I stopped for dinner in Champaign, then Google Maps sent me out on back roads until I got around the bad construction backup near Rantoul, after I "primed the pump" by heading north out of town on Mattis Avenue. From then on it was trouble-free.
On the other hand, one of my best experiences with Google Maps occurred one Thanksgiving Eve, on my way to Midland, Michigan. Near Kalamazoo, it informed me of a faster route, and when I took it, it quickly put me on surface streets. I was thinking "WTF?" until I passed another I-94 on-ramp, where the tag said "58 minutes slower." Apparently, there was a wreck near Battle Creek. The new route put me on the designated I-94 emergency bypass once I left Kalamazoo, and past the wreck it returned me to the interstate.
Nice anecdote - was there too. Don't think we can hold nav apps accountable in these extreme circumstances. Just not enough data for them to extrapolate. I studied my route while driving in from Washington and thought about pinch points on the way back and possible mitigations. Used gmaps real time traffic and did pretty well coming back north - following gmaps routing would have been bad. Oh, and then WSDOT closed I-90 for blasting. Glad I missed that.
We had several cars decamping from middle-of-nowhere Kentucky to Champaign, IL. I plotted the route back by looking at the paper map in the glove compartment for Ohio River crossings, and then telling the GPS to take me on that bridge. Everyone else took I-24 back until they got cell coverage telling them that maybe IL-145 and US-45 (already saturated with Illinois eclipse traffic) would be faster than I-57 (even more saturated). I managed to get back at least an hour faster than the rest, although I still wonder if it wouldn't have been faster to detour as far east as Evansville, or at least the minor county road further east (as most of the traffic I hit was ~1mi long backups every stop sign).
Waze, does have an option to avoid dirt roads, it works great when you have random dirt (pot hole filled) road as an alternate route to work that you never want to take at least. It is for some reason hidden in the settings, and not enable by default.
I was on the same route as you. Fortunately we (me with my friend) were in an SUV with AWD, and had a lot of fun drifting through a trail (maybe not the same one you got) following advice from Google Maps.
Oh yeah and we did get ahead of miles of stuck traffic.
Huh, I got really lucky leaving when I did, we decided to ditch Madras slightly before 10am and got up to Warm Springs, where we pulled over and watched the eclipse.
Then, it was empty roads on US 26 as we went back at 90mph to 110mph till we hit Gresham and stopped off. Never seen my car driven that fast, but it sure did beat sitting in traffic!
I was driving back from South Carolina to Northern Virginia the day after the eclipse. The first hours were uneventful, by the time I hit I-81 things got crazy. I had all 3 nav apps running (Waze, Google, Apple), Waze kept routing me off of the interstate and onto side roads, which in SW Virginia involve quite hilly terrain so are anything but direct. Apple and Google never deviated from the interstate even though the predicted arrival time kept climbing. In the end I took some of Waze's advice but I am not sure that it saved any time. I finally went with my own navigation system, I know that this road (US Rt 29) will eventually get me to where I want to be AND it is not at a standstill. I am sure it took longer, but the drive was way more pleasant. Bottom-line, a drive that normally would take a little more than 8 hours, took 12 hours and no nav app saved the day.
I was using Waze when leaving Madras, Oregon, after the eclipse heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington. It suggested a route that would bypass a couple miles of slow traffic, but the road it sent me down was a dirt road with a periodic undulation in it that caused massive vibration, and my car and the two or three others that were on it were throwing up so much dust it was very hard to see. I turned around and went back to the main route and put up with the slow traffic.
A friend of mine was also leaving Madras, but heading to California. He was using Google. It also was giving some poor route advice. Here's what he told me when we compared notes of our trips home:
> Google kept sending us onto logging roads: we bailed on the first when we were told to turn onto a non-existent road; we bailed on the second when a van came out and told us that ~5 cars were stuck axle-deep in mud; we bailed on the third when we got to a sign informing us that we were about to enter an off-road-vehicle trail.
I'd also like to see a review of how the various cell phone companies handled it. Both me and my friend are on T-Mobile, and something like 90% of the text messages we tried to exchange were either lost or delivered hours late. I think we managed one or two short voice calls. Most voice calls either did not connect, or on occasion would connect but only one of us could hear the other.