Designing Google Maps for Motorbikes
design.google
design.google
One time, I decided to just put the phone in my pocket and take my bike to a location. I had the ear buds in my ears, I thought, voice is enough...
Oh my, was I wrong. I ended up missing most turn off in streets due to latency, some crossings made no sense over audio, a total disaster.
So I got a stand to attach the phone to the handle bars... And that works great, for about 20 mins. I live in Australia and the heat of the sun on the phone + google maps using CPU will literally shut off the phone as it reaches 50C+... The phone just turns off on me as I approach the hard-part of the journey... Superb.
So now I just research it before leaving, mentally map it in my mind, look up street view for turn offs... Then I Yolo it all the way. When I finally admit I'm lost, I pull up, bring out the phone and start google maps then...
I used it for 3 days before a guy told me to give old fashioned maps a try, and gave me a few state maps. My tank bag has a nice window slot for them, so why not use it in tandem?
Within 2 hours I had totally stopped paying attention to the gps and just went off the map. The next day I didn't even use the gps at all, and ended up using just maps for next 3 weeks riding around the country.
If the signage is good (in the US it's superb, people just don't pay attention to it/understand it) then I have found a regular old maps to be far superior. You can quickly see all info on the map (no dicking around with zoom/scrolling on the touchscreen) and you can adjust your route very easily on the fly.
Seriously, I cannot recommend paper maps enough. Take some time to understand how to read the map (if you're not sure already) and pay attention to road signs. The two integrate beautifully and make getting around easy. If you have a place to put it on your bike, give it a try.
Especially on sections where I have to change direction every 300 to 500 meters I don't want to deal with reading a map. Voice navigation in my headset and an occasional quick glance at the screen is much safer than fiddling with a paper map.
The main problem is, if I'm on a motorcycle trip I want to spend as little time on those roads as possible. It's difficult to manage enough maps to get at "the good stuff" on a long ride - but a decent GPS will get you details quickly, and deals well with the highly variable signage once you are on secondary highways and tertiary roads.
I think the best bet is a mix of both plus, for me, significant time spent in pure explore mode (no map at all). That's not for everyone I suppose but I've had some of my best travel days navigating by little more than the sun and major features.
DID YOU GET THAT, GOOGLE?
Although I do admire setups where you don't have to look down as much. That was one big drawback of a tank-bag. Felt like coming up to an intersection/roundabout, if it wasn't obvious where to go, it was actually pretty tough to glance down, find your place on the map, interpret where to go, then translate that into real world 'I need to take the third exit'.
There are times when gmaps makes things way too easy.
Worked fine, even Touch ID was mostly usable, but I can't imagine what an unlaminated map would have looked like at the end of that storm.
The 'headphone hearing protection' would make the volume too quiet to hear over the engine any time you jiggled the headphone jack. Required a screen interaction to fix.
Of course if you didn't hear the audio prompt or couldn't make it out precisely, you're on your own - no way to check it or get it to repeat if the phone's in your pocket.
Cheap rain-proof phone holders have a zip around the outside - so you can connect wired headphones or a charger - but not both, as they poke out different ends of the phone.
Wired headphones linking you to something linked to your bike make getting on and off complicated.
Motorbikes don't have standard cigarette lighters to plug a standard charger into. You'd have to mess with the bike's wiring to add a phone charger, so I went without.
The battery wasn't good enough to navigate a journey that was 60 minutes each way. Google Maps didn't offer any options like automatically turning off the screen on long straight roads.
Once your phone's in a waterproof holder and you're wearing motorcycling gloves, your touchscreen won't work. So you can't quickly cancel navigation to save battery (or dismiss the hearing protection warning) while stopped at some street lights.
All things considered, it was pretty clear the navigation experience wasn't designed for motorcycling.
Excerpt:
Although they weren’t originally designed with this purpose in mind, car cigarette lighters provided an opportunity that was simply too good to pass up. Since the actual lighter portion was removable once the coil-and-reel version fell out of use, the receptacle itself provided easy access to power and ground. That allowed for the development of a power plug that could be inserted and removed with no need to permanently wire an accessory into the electrical system of a car.
The ANSI/SAE J563 specification was developed to ensure compatibility between cigarette lighter receptacles and 12V power plugs made by different manufacturers.
There were the Hella plugs [0] in old Volkswagens (our '81 Vanagon has one), looked much like a lighter plug but smaller, and a better design. But they never seemed to have caught on except on BMW motorcycles. In fact, whenever I hear a reference to them, they're called "BMW plugs" because that's the only thing that uses them anymore.
[0] http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/291040452525-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
Most touring bikes, and many scooters have a cigarette lighter attachment point. My SH300 has one in the glove box. The 2016+ VFR800 has one. Etc.
Many better quality gloves have conductive tips on their forefingers for capacitive touchscreen usage these days. My Alpinestars SP8 gloves do.
I find Google Maps audio directions just barely acceptable for London navigation. I prefer my Garmin Zumo, but only use that if my destination is a long way off the big city-crossing roads I otherwise know reasonably well.
It comes with my when I have planned routes, rather than destinations, though. Google Maps is dreadful for planning a route with waypoints - it needs constant interaction at every stage.
Sadly, as a student on a £300 motorbike, I didn't have the money for such luxuries :)
I said I couldn't hear audio directions, barrkel said a bluetooth helmet would have helped, I said maybe but I couldn't afford that, you say you disagree and your helmet doesn't have bluetooth - what are we disagreeing about?
There just needs to be a "no visuals" setting where you get given much more audio information.
The worst experience I've had was riding in Slavic countries with just headphones in and realising after a few miles that GMaps couldn't pronounce the road names and so was just leaving a silence.
I'd get "Turn left on to ''". I thought the roads were numbered and I was constantly turning onto highway 2.
This is by far the best way I've found to use mapping apps while riding. Setting aside the heat issue, GPS apps require more concentration than I like to give them while riding. It's a lot easier to check other vehicles rear view mirrors, judge intent of drivers, and just generally keep your head on a swivel without a GPS to look at.
I have found that for the occasional reminder, my Apple watch's taps work well (can't see my watch though, so you gotta remember which taps are which for left/right).
The reality is that I want detailed maps for route planning and local exploration, but very simple maps for the actual navigation part.
It's not as smooth as using a phone when it comes to maps, but for preplanned routes it works great. It has made 4-6 hour bike-rides on unknown roads much easier. No more stops at intersections to struggle with the phone to see where to go, can just keep the speed up looking at the display once in a while. The display is also very easy to read in sunlight.
I've managed to drive/ride and just listen to voice which worked well enough for directions.
Mostly though, I'd love gmaps to be optimised for finding me the 'fun' roads. Sort of a bestbikingroads algorithm that lets me find the few twisties in between where I am, and my destination, even if it's quite a detour.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Motorcycle-Holder-Handlebar-...
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand&hl=...
We're going to a friend's place in a different city, more than an hour away. My SO is driving, I'm navigating. Just as we're about to enter the city and start the most complex part of the drive, my phone dies. Turns out, the constant glare of the sun + rubber casing + the already absurd heat generated by Google's navigation overheated the phone. We had to stop for a moment, let it cool down, and only then could continue.
My takeaway from that experience is that on long trips, I now only engage navigation in the important areas, and take off the rubber casing when driving in warm weather.
Conveniently for me it was raining the whole time, so overheating wasn't an issue. Rather, I had the opposite where I almost froze riding through the rain in Đà Lạt wearing only tshirt and shorts.
When I got a flat tyre, I just stopped near a local, pointed to my flat tyre, and they gestured directions to get to a mechanic (not that they're hard to find in Vietnam).
I'd imagine it would be the same if you only had a paper map with your destination. Just show the map to a local and in no time they'd tell you where you are and the best way to get there.
Outside of the touristic areas, Vietnamese people are generally really nice and helpful people, who don't try and rip you off. I needed to get the front shocks replaced on my bike. The mechanic next to the hostel wanted something like 800,000 dong to replace them, so I declined. Later, my shocks blew out in Da Nang and I actually had to get them replaced. The mechanic, who couldn't speak word of English, did them for me for 400,000 dong without even haggling. I'm fairly sure that's the local price, because I can't imagine it's possible to get two shocks, plus an hour of labour for under US$20, back home the same job would cost me probably $200 at least.
Get a better maps app, there's an abundance of them. Google Maps for mobile is just a resource hog with a shitty UI.
I have a Bluetooth headset in my helmet, so I can hear the directions... which are usually close enough. But you still do get some occasionally confusing voice prompts that - without the screen to glance at - may lead you to a wrong turn.
I do have a handlebar mount I've resorted to on a few occasions, but as others have noted (a) the phone can overheat, (b) subjecting a $500 device to the vibration and chance of falling is not ideal, and (c) I've had the acceleratorometer actions kick in unexpectedly, leading to the phone battery dying faster since it turned the LED flashlight mode on.
That said, I have only one serious complain - the opt-out-of-route-change that they've made the default is a huge issue, and I really wish there was a setting to disable that. If I've gone in and picked between a few potential routes, having it decide a different one is faster and that I'll need to press a button on screen to stay on my preferred heading ends up leaving me off course and/or on the side of the road digging my phone back out.
(And before someone suggests voice commands to fix it... that's not a workable solution. While the helmet cuts down noise, it doesn't eliminate it, and I have enough problems with voice recognition that I leave it permanently disabled.)
In the end, I normally leave the phone in my pocket, make due with voice alerts, and leave a few minutes early so I can safely miss an exit without panic. The last thing you need on a highway filled with texting drivers (completely legal in AZ) is to be distracted and making multi-lane changes at the last second.
If it supported GPX natively, you would likely capture the entire North American and European touring market in one fell swoop. I'm guessing you (google) never asked which kind of goes against the entire point of this article
Phones don't really work mounted on a bike, but a simple display could do the job. Sort of how android watch displays an arrow, but using a low power screen.
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/dashbot-a-49...
However it takes about 10 seconds for the screen to dim to the monochrome power saver mode and then it's impossible to see anything during daylight.
Android wear does not support a permanently on screen all the time and I would totally buy a cheap device like that just for navigating.
Edit: Oh well, android only.
Need to make sure you've got Maps installed on the watch -- I just realised the reason mine stopped doing that was that I didn't reinstall it after my last factory reset.
Buy a Pebble? I have been using a Pebble 2 SE for over a year and one of the primary use cases is so I can navigate on motorcycle.
I leave phone in my pocket. I set the route, maps sends a notification before turns and the watch picks it up. Works in full sunlight and I shake it at night to light it up.
Gets 5-6 days of battery life, I think I paid $40 for mine.
Much easier to process this than the full map on something like my phone or the map on the center console.
It's a shame the dash screen doesn't work with android auto though. (I understand, logically, that the dash and the android auto stuff are separate systems, but it'd be nice...) Nissan actually has pretty good maps, but they're rather ugly (and not quite as good as Google's).
I used Motorbikes everyday, while in my city it is quite helpful to have Google Maps, sometimes the map just didnt understand about the rules, that this road is one way, that only cars is allowed.
One bad story that I had with Google Maps while riding a motorbike was, Google map decided to reroute itself without me knowing (phone is in my pocket, I only listened the navigation aid), I ended up circling the city back because Google Maps decided that it is the best way to get to my destination. I wasted an hour circling the city before I noticed I was heading back to the direction where I came fron and stopped to check the Google Maps app and noticed it routing me through another routes.
How can Google Maps continue defaulting to car and Uber when asks for directions in ultra-dense cities with great public and cycling infrastructure (like Paris), while Google pretends helping the environment?
Even when the subway directions are 10x cheaper and faster, Google Maps keeps highlighting car directions. Maybe the referral fee that Google gets from Uber (and other "partners") explains it.
Only thing is, there are tons of cool cycle routes around, and I'd like to say I prefer those. It needs some safety/effort-based preferences for routing. Like, I'd prefer to ride 2 or 3km more, if it's on a dedicated bike path, rather than ride direct to my destination on busy traffic roads.
And no, an electric motor won't cut it, due to power density. I don't want it to be limited to 500 W or so, I want it to have more than that. And mechanics have much more power density than electromagnetics.
Not that I'm advocating for loud motorcycles, mufflers exist for a reason...that bike would set off car alarms while just idling past in parking lots which was kind of annoying.
Google Maps and also Apple Maps is impossible to use in bright sun when you just stop to check the map and have your rainbans on. The road is beige on dark yellow - the color palette is just wrong and impossible to adjust.
Slightly off tangent but having been to Jakarta (never again, what an absolutely disgusting slum of a city) the traffic in that city is probably the worst ever (maybe Indian traffic can have it beat)
Even more off tangent but it's crazy how illogical some places can be (from my perspective). In Jakarta all addresses are more or less useless since the house/street numbers are in completely random order (the order they're built I guess) so you have no idea where some building with some particular number resides on a road/street relative to some other building.
Finally a tip to a fellow traveller, if you're asking for a taxi and give them the address and the driver goes to the other drivers to ask about its location the chances are he doesn't have a clue but he'll be very happy to take you for random spin and ask you for money.