Comment by leokeba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leokeba | Hacker News Reader

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If the developers are around, I would like to ask a simple question : Does this app only use realtime data for calculating ETA and routes, or does it learn some statistical regularities in the traffic patterns to make predictions ?

I'm asking because this is the main weakness of all similar apps that I know of, they always give you an estimation using only the current state of traffic on the whole journey, so if you are going towards a busy city at peak traffic time it may add one or two hours to the ETA even if you are still 5 hours away and everything will be gone by the time you get there. Obviously the reverse situation is even more annoying, I live in the Paris area, and when I leave home around 4pm and ask google maps an itinerary, it may tell me I'm only 30 minutes away, but 15 minutes later shit hits the fan and I end up an hour late on my schedule.

Obviously after a while you start learning the traffic patterns and plan accordingly, which is okay I guess, but we're in 2023, how can google not be up to the task of correctly predicting a traffic spike when it's regular on a daily or weekly basis ? Is that just too much data / compute for them ? If anybody has a clue, I'm curious.

I thought the "arrive at" feature of Google maps took into account usual traffic patterns at that time of day?

In theory.

However it appears to underestimate traffic delays for DC->OBX beach traffic. On a summer Saturday morning, that’s a 6-7 hour drive. Or worse. Apple Maps has it closer to 5-5:30 for most of the day. Google gives a range from 4:45-6:30 - 4:45 is basically impossible any time of day and year but 6:30 is ballpark-ish if you don’t hit a major traffic jam.

But maybe that’s a worst-case route.

Here We Go is frighteningly accurate for SF bay area traffic predictions. (E.g., within 2 minutes, driving between south bay and north San Francisco, with traffic). It must be using statistical models to predict future traffic.

It is often pre-loaded on European car console units so you may be using it without realizing it. It’s free for iOS and Android, and works offline (offline support is the killer feature for me).

How long have you used Here WeGo? It used to be my primary maps application but a couple years back they updated it and broke everything (offline address search stopped working, no route choices anymore, I think they removed the TTS options which made the voice directions much harder to follow, etc).

The reviews for the app tanked after that disaster and practically all of them mentioned the update as the pain point, do you know if they ever recovered a semblance of what it used to be? Maybe I'll have to check it out again, I've been using Magic Earth ever since then and it's pretty solid but there are a few minor things I still miss.

Well that's also what I used to believe, kinda makes sense. But drawing from my own anecdotal experience I had to conclude that's not the case. Maybe I'm wrong, and it's just VERY bad at it, or it doesn't work where I live.

Well you can set a departure time and it gives "Typically ..." so it must have some information like that. And their Waze gives a graph of journey times by time of departure.

Gmaps give me a different estimated time if I ask for a route tomorrow afternoon ("normally 35-45 minutes") or tomorrow evening ("26 minutes").

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