alt Hacker NewsThis is exactly why on traditional gps maps I prefer it to be very very zoomed out. It's far too common that mapping tools make something like a sudden second turn invisible to you until it is too late to switch lanes.
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I remember for at least a while people would complain about how GPS navigation ruined their sense of the local area. Probably stopped hearing about it because people have just surrendered to the apps, but I think part of the reason is also that by default they were just zoomed in way too close. If you forced them back out a ways, I was actually learning a lot about my local area. Like, there's all these subdivisions around, you know, and from the outside who knows what connects to what, I'm not going to just duck in to a subdivision and physically navigate the streets to see how they're all connected, but driving around with the navigation made it much more clear... when it was zoomed out somewhat.
I find that Apple Maps is typically pretty smart with its automatic zoom. For a typical intersection with just one turn to navigate, it will zoom in to give you a good sense of the lanes, stop signs/lights, etc. But when there are consecutive turns to navigate, or a heavily curved section of road (like highway on-ramps) it will zoom out and even rotate the map to show that upcoming context.