Google Maps just fucking SUCKS now

[jakeroot]

Just curious, is there any knowledge on how the range of drive times for the "depart at" feature with directions is calculated?  I'm wondering if the long one, or at least the "arrive at" time (often but not always matching the long one) is the one where you don't drive faster than the speed limit, because the one it quotes for the "leave now" feature definitely isn't.

I think it uses historical Waze data to calculate the approximate drive time depending on past traffic patterns for the specified time of day.

Mine seems to assume I go at least 15 mph over the limit at all times. I assume this because, after doing so, I arrive at exactly the ETA.

The ETA adjusts as you travel.

My apologies for not being specific, but I was referring to situations where the ETA does not change from start to finish. Which is surprisingly common from my experience. Or at the very least, it's within a minute or two.

[Rothman]

Just curious, is there any knowledge on how the range of drive times for the "depart at" feature with directions is calculated?  I'm wondering if the long one, or at least the "arrive at" time (often but not always matching the long one) is the one where you don't drive faster than the speed limit, because the one it quotes for the "leave now" feature definitely isn't.

I think it uses historical Waze data to calculate the approximate drive time depending on past traffic patterns for the specified time of day.

Mine seems to assume I go at least 15 mph over the limit at all times. I assume this because, after doing so, I arrive at exactly the ETA.

The ETA adjusts as you travel.

My apologies for not being specific, but I was referring to situations where the ETA does not change from start to finish. Which is surprisingly common from my experience. Or at the very least, it's within a minute or two.

I haven't ever had it not change, even on short trips.

[jakeroot]

Just curious, is there any knowledge on how the range of drive times for the "depart at" feature with directions is calculated?  I'm wondering if the long one, or at least the "arrive at" time (often but not always matching the long one) is the one where you don't drive faster than the speed limit, because the one it quotes for the "leave now" feature definitely isn't.

I think it uses historical Waze data to calculate the approximate drive time depending on past traffic patterns for the specified time of day.

Mine seems to assume I go at least 15 mph over the limit at all times. I assume this because, after doing so, I arrive at exactly the ETA.

The ETA adjusts as you travel.

My apologies for not being specific, but I was referring to situations where the ETA does not change from start to finish. Which is surprisingly common from my experience. Or at the very least, it's within a minute or two.

I haven't ever had it not change, even on short trips.

It's about 50/50 for me, being within a minute of the original ETA at least.

But, for the sake of my explanation, let's assume that ETA is irrelevant. Waze still seems to assume that it will take me, say, eight minutes to go ten miles, even if the speed limit is 60.

[vdeane]

Is the COVID-19 layer no longer displaying for anyone else?  It's still on the list, and they still have the thing on the bottom with some numbers, but the map overlay seems to be gone.

[MATraveler128]

Is the COVID-19 layer no longer displaying for anyone else?  It's still on the list, and they still have the thing on the bottom with some numbers, but the map overlay seems to be gone.

It's not working for me either. Must be some kind of bug.

[doorknob60]

They broke Street View again. A lot of areas it will only let you move one frame at a time, making it painfully slow to get around. Doesn't always happen, but it's happening a lot. I seem to recall this being a problem months ago, then it got fixed. Hope they fix it again.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Yep. I was finishing the Giro d'Italia route, and man, it was a real PITA the last days (on top of the reduced speed). They have updated Street View a few days ago in the countries they don't continuously update, and like always they broke it. Another thing is that my computer would somehow crash after a while, but I found that is more of a Firefox issue because I switched to Chrome and all went fine.

[Molandfreak]

I mean, I suppose this is US 224 ALT... 

[Caps81943]

The slow traveling and bad snapping have been UNBEARABLE today.

[SkyPesos]

Anyone else have issues with GSV moving you in random directions on each click now? Very difficult to even look at the area around a road when it can either move you to the left or right on another road or move you backwards when you want to go forward.

[Scott5114]

Anyone else have issues with GSV moving you in random directions on each click now? Very difficult to even look at the area around a road when it can either move you to the left or right on another road or move you backwards when you want to go forward.

Yup. Between that and the slow as hell scrolling, it's kind of getting to the point where it's faster to move along by repeatedly dropping the pin and exiting out until you get the view you want. A true failure of software design.

[kphoger]

Anyone else have issues with GSV moving you in random directions on each click now? Very difficult to even look at the area around a road when it can either move you to the left or right on another road or move you backwards when you want to go forward.

Yup. Between that and the slow as hell scrolling, it's kind of getting to the point where it's faster to move along by repeatedly dropping the pin and exiting out until you get the view you want. A true failure of software design.

I have good luck zooming in on the little corner-map and just clicking a different spot on the blue line.

[vdeane]

Remember that glitch that removed the points from measuring distance?  It's back, but it seems like this time they're still there and can be interacted with, they're just not visible the way they were before.  Mouse over the line and the tooltip will change when you're on a point, so they can still be moved/removed despite being invisible.

[pderocco]

I have no idea if this has been mentioned in this 94-page topic, as there is no board function that searches an individual topic.

In the past year, I've noticed more and more "new" street view imagery that's almost unusable. Wikipedia has a couple of items that may be relevant:

• 2017: On September 5, Google announced that they are improving the quality of the street view panoramic photo, revamping its mapping vehicles with all-new high-resolution camera systems and artificial intelligence to capture even better imagery. The new Google cars have been seen in various American cities since March 2017, as well as in Japan since August. The first images taken with the new generation of cameras were available online on September 13.
  
• October 2017: The makers of the Insta360 Pro announce the certification of the first "Street View auto ready" camera for US$3500; it uses six lenses for a 360º view and comes with Stitcher software. In addition to purchase, the camera rig is also available to qualified entities as part of the Google loaner program, with 50 cameras available to loan, making possible Google Street View imagery coverage of more places that Google might not visit, and to entities for whom a purchase is impractical or impossible.

There's a lot of imagery in which the roof of the car carrying the camera is visible, and which is super over-compressed and washed out. I'm wondering if this is the 2017 "improved" technology. In Google Earth, this imagery doesn't even respond to navigation clicks. In Google Maps, it looks like this:

https://goo.gl/maps/xP5pN4MXppqJBfPK8

This isn't always new imagery where formerly there was none. Sometimes, it duplicates older imagery which is beautiful, and once you land on the bad imagery, you can't get back to the good imagery without exiting and re-entering.

Some imagery shot from more portable cameras, perhaps from the Insta360 gear, is completely cockeyed, rotating around a non-vertical axis:

https://goo.gl/maps/GVe9D5STFM4HC6XH9

It's almost as if there's a competition to see how bad they can make this.

[CtrlAltDel]

Anyone else have issues with GSV moving you in random directions on each click now? Very difficult to even look at the area around a road when it can either move you to the left or right on another road or move you backwards when you want to go forward.

Yup. Between that and the slow as hell scrolling, it's kind of getting to the point where it's faster to move along by repeatedly dropping the pin and exiting out until you get the view you want. A true failure of software design.

I have good luck zooming in on the little corner-map and just clicking a different spot on the blue line.

I haven't. What tends to happen is that the little person turns around and then I have to rotate it. Sometimes I get lucky, but it's not as common as you'd hope.

[hotdogPi]

as there is no board function that searches an individual topic

Using the search feature while inside a thread will search that thread only.

[vdeane]

I have no idea if this has been mentioned in this 94-page topic, as there is no board function that searches an individual topic.

In the past year, I've noticed more and more "new" street view imagery that's almost unusable. Wikipedia has a couple of items that may be relevant:

• 2017: On September 5, Google announced that they are improving the quality of the street view panoramic photo, revamping its mapping vehicles with all-new high-resolution camera systems and artificial intelligence to capture even better imagery. The new Google cars have been seen in various American cities since March 2017, as well as in Japan since August. The first images taken with the new generation of cameras were available online on September 13.
  
• October 2017: The makers of the Insta360 Pro announce the certification of the first "Street View auto ready" camera for US$3500; it uses six lenses for a 360º view and comes with Stitcher software. In addition to purchase, the camera rig is also available to qualified entities as part of the Google loaner program, with 50 cameras available to loan, making possible Google Street View imagery coverage of more places that Google might not visit, and to entities for whom a purchase is impractical or impossible.

There's a lot of imagery in which the roof of the car carrying the camera is visible, and which is super over-compressed and washed out. I'm wondering if this is the 2017 "improved" technology. In Google Earth, this imagery doesn't even respond to navigation clicks. In Google Maps, it looks like this:

https://goo.gl/maps/xP5pN4MXppqJBfPK8

This isn't always new imagery where formerly there was none. Sometimes, it duplicates older imagery which is beautiful, and once you land on the bad imagery, you can't get back to the good imagery without exiting and re-entering.

Some imagery shot from more portable cameras, perhaps from the Insta360 gear, is completely cockeyed, rotating around a non-vertical axis:

https://goo.gl/maps/GVe9D5STFM4HC6XH9

It's almost as if there's a competition to see how bad they can make this.

That's not Google imagery.  That's some third party called "PTOWN HACKS Provincetown Guide".  Third party imagery can be a crapshoot but is worse than Google's most of the time, which is why I don't understand why Google seems to favor it.  It seems like if there is any third party imagery in an area, Google will prefer it over its own, even if its own is newer, and because the sequencing of images isn't exactly the same, it can be offset from Google's, which makes it hard to switch out of.  Third party imagery can be great if Google hasn't gone somewhere or hasn't been somewhere recently, but it sucks the rest of the time.

[Mr_Northside]

Anyone else have issues with GSV moving you in random directions on each click now? Very difficult to even look at the area around a road when it can either move you to the left or right on another road or move you backwards when you want to go forward.

I still notice this on occasion  (especially in densely crowded areas).   The navigation can sink to levels as clunky as the Bing street-view equivalent at times.

[Rothman]

Route numbers/shields are missing on my Android version of Google Maps now.

[pderocco]

Route numbers/shields are missing on my Android version of Google Maps now.

Could be a cache problem. Perhaps rebooting your phone might help. Or maybe they come from a different server, and it was down for a while.

[Rothman]

Route numbers/shields are missing on my Android version of Google Maps now.

Could be a cache problem. Perhaps rebooting your phone might help. Or maybe they come from a different server, and it was down for a while.

They're back now.  I think it may have had something to do with the public transportation layer.  Found that Google Maps had turned it on for some reason; flipping it off brought the shields back, I think.  Either that or the last problem with the server you mentioned.

[vdeane]

The transit layer does indeed cause the shields to disappear.

[Mr. Matté]

"No Street View imagery available here."

I've been getting this annoying popup as of the past day or two even if just trying to advance one sphere forward and I know GSV imagery exists.

[LM117]

I noticed that it's now possible to see older streetview images on the android app. Before that, you had to do it with a browser. Took long enough.

[jakeroot]

I noticed that it's now possible to see older streetview images on the android app. Before that, you had to do it with a browser. Took long enough.

I've also noticed this. I think it rolled out, at least to iOS devices, in late July. It's been awesome being able to research something on-the-spot rather than having to wait until getting home.