alt Hacker News> It's early in the year. You want to drive straight through the middle of Chinatown in SF. Why might that be a bad idea?
I feel like a Google Maps-style system would discover this automatically by noting via phone location data that there is heavy traffic in Chinatown.
(I do get the author’s point, but I think that factually this example would not be a problem)
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Maps apps see the streets that don’t have cars on them (the same ones closed for a festival) as good routes to send vehicles because there’s currently no vehicles using them. It keeps trying to route people there and doesn’t understand why.
I think it takes someone (at Google) manually marking those roads as unavailable before it will stop trying. I’ve seen it happen with other things too, like if a highway is closed because of a bad accident.
Unfortunately, I just had this experience with Google Maps last month—I wanted to go to downtown to buy cheese at Pike Place, but I didn't realize that 6th avenue was closed off for the annual Pride Parade. Traffic was horrible, and Google Maps kept telling me to turn right onto closed off streets until I just had to abandon my trip entirely. Definitely some lack of communication between Seattle city planning and the Google maps team, but even the existing Google Maps systems weren't able to react fast enough to give me any warnings and the time estimation was laughably incorrect.