Apple Maps: I wish there was a way to block out certain left turns

TidBITS Talk
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This is a big problem. I deal with it every day. Traffic home from work is very volatile, and I don’t know by which route Apple will send me. But there are a couple of places where making a left turn is nearly impossible, and sometimes dangerous, and yet it sends me those ways sometimes. On my own, I have found ways to avoid those turns, as long as I plan ahead. And the rest of steps in those routes are fine. But those left turns have to be avoided at all costs.

Part of what makes it worse is that the CarPlay interface makes it almost impossible to tell if that impossible turn has been proposed for the route home. The overview is too zoomed out to see it, and Apple doesn’t offer a view of the turn-by-turn steps, unless you pick up your phone, which you can’t safely do while driving, which in turn means taking longer to get on the road (or pulling over).

What I’d like to do is to tell Maps to avoid certain left turns. Then it can route whatever the heck else that it wants, and I will be fine, and won’t have to stop and evaluate the route before driving home every day.

But I don’t see such an option, either on iPhone or macOS Maps. For the record, I’m not seeing a way to do this on Google Maps for iPhone, either.

Any suggestions??

Thanks!

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I cannot offer you any tips on how to do what you want — I don’t think you can choose much more than avoid freeways etc. but you cannot alter a specific turn or force a certain way through a specific intersection.

I do have a somewhat similar issue even outside of CarPlay (which my old Prius doesn’t support). I like the zoomed out view because it shows me the options coming up which turn by turn doesn’t show. OTOH I love seeing the speed limit and lane assist with turn by turn and I can’t get those to display in zoomed out view. Now if only I knew what to tell Siri to get it to switch me between the two views, but whatever I try it doesn’t work. And the last things I want to be doing in heavy traffic is trying to hit that tiny little button at the top right that switches between the views.

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This is just one of a number of things I wish GPS driving apps could do.

In addition to blocking certain turns at certain intersections:

  • I wish I could tell them not to route me through residential neighborhoods that my destination isn’t part of unless not doing so would add a significant amount of additional time and distance, such as when a road is completely impassible (and by “significant”, I mean several minutes and at least two miles).

  • I wish I could tell them to not have me make left turns at or drive straight across intersections when I’m on a small road and the cross street is a major arterial road unless there’s a traffic light, a four-way stop, or a roundabout.

  • I wish they could tell me why they’re advising me to take a different route from usual. This is a big annoyance, because I typically use Waze whenever I’m driving more than about two miles, so I can see problems up ahead and keep an eye on projected arrival time, and while it usually gives me the same route between the same places, sometimes it will choose a significantly different route when there’s nothing showing on the map that would make my usual route slower.

  • I wish I could tell them to have my route approach a destination from a particular direction (usually, I would want it to have me approach with the destination on the right). Sometimes my destinations require street parking, and I’d prefer to park on the same side of the street as my destination if there’s space available. Sometimes, they don’t require street parking, but the turn into the parking lot is a left turn across heavy traffic, so approaching from the other direction would be much easier.

There are others that are more minor, such as wishing that Waze would stop giving me notifications when a new promotional voice is available. I don’t have directions spoken unless I’m in an unfamiliar area, but I do have it announce road hazards and police presence verbally. And the promotional voices always use gimmicky catchphrases with these announcements, and they get annoying very quickly. Promotional voices also usually can’t say the name of the road it wants me to turn on. So I’ve given up on even trying the promotional voices anymore. But whenever a new one pops up, that stupid red dot on the hamburger menu icon stares me in the face. But those sort of things are specific idiosyncrasies of specific apps. The ones I bulleted seem to be a problem in all three of the main GPS driving apps (Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze).

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I’d simply like to be able to update them as regards new changes. A road blocked, a new one-way, etc. Should be some process which after a number of notices from users somebody checks and updates the app.

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I’ve also been wondering about what triggers a Maps update. In our neighborhood they installed new stop signs around 2019 turning a previous 2-way into an all-way stop. So now when turn by turn says turn left at the next stop what it actually means is at the stop after the next (because there’s now a new stop in between it doesn’t know about). I’ve tried reporting this new stop a couple times, but seemingly to no avail. Even though it’s simple to see by eye at that intersection. Doesn’t Apple have ground truth people out there that verify these reports and update the database? How do you actually get your changes in there?

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Probably not a solution for you, but in the past I have solved problems with routing by adding stops or via points, as I call them in my head. As an example, I went on vacation to Montana and wanted to drive as long into the wilderness or rural places as possible. Google wanted me out of there as fast as possible. This is one day planned 8 hour drive: Google Maps

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It almost sounds like most of you want some sort of artificial intelligence feature for maps. Give me a route that avoids left turns where there are no traffic lights but try to avoid rerouting me into residential neighborhoods even if that would be faster, etc.

FWIW, for something like this, I just use old-fashioned looking at maps ahead of time to decide on a route when I reach the destination. The navigation apps always reroute if you leave their preferred route so they’ll continue to try to get me there. But I believe that you can do this now by using an intermediate “destination” (or a few) on the same side of the road just before your ultimate destination so the navigation will direct you there first. I haven’t done that in a while so I don’t know if that’s still a good thing to try.

Unlike you, it’s rare for me to use navigation for a route that I know well. It’s only when I generally don’t know where I am going that I use navigation.

FWIW, I had two examples of this in just the last week. On Monday my wife and I were driving home on a 6+ hour trip using Apple Maps and we started getting alerts fairly early on that a road was closed on our route 200 miles ahead and that guidance was changed. And last night we were meeting friends at a restaurant we’d never been to (only about 25 miles away this time) and used Google Maps and, again, it asked about changing the route due to traffic conditions ahead (with two big buttons on screen, “accept” or “no thanks”).

I am also fairly certain that Apple Maps and Google Maps monitor how people are moving through traffic as they are using these products as they drive and will alert or offer to change navigation due to any issues they perceive with traffic movement. I know that Waze was very aggressive about this when I used to use it, and it’s aggressiveness about trying to guide you around traffic through residential neighborhoods was one of the reasons that I stopped using it. I almost always use Apple Maps these days, because Google Map’s interface has just become so busy and advertising-directed, and Apple’s support of local landmarks has improved a great deal in recent versions. My wife still prefers Google Maps - hence why we saw the rerouting behavior with both products in the last few days.

I know that both Google Maps and Apple Maps has a reporting feature for temporary changes due to road closures, etc. - I’ve done both in the past. When I did it with Google about 7 or so years ago to report a road closed for 18 months due to bridge repair a person at Google responded to the request asking for more detail. On Mac with Apple Maps there is a “report something missing…” menu in the Maps Menu; on Google Maps I believe there is something similar in the hamburger menu.

One more thing that I’ll note: over the weekend, while I was away, we wanted to get some cash at a local ATM. I started walking navigation to it on Apple Maps and then started a walking workout on my watch, and this was great: the watch kept showing me a very good map view of my route as I walked while the workout app collected the workout data in the background. I did have my phone in my pocket, so I think the navigation was still happening there (the one time I got confused about the route it re-routed on the fly and still got me there.) This was a great experience IMO, and I didn’t have to keep my phone in my hand in order to do the navigation. Apple has done a nice job with integration on this one.

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My condo complex has a connector to the neighboring complex that’s been blocked to vehicular traffic ever since my complex was built, because said neighboring complex didn’t want any cut-through traffic (their connection to the main road has a traffic light, whereas ours doesn’t). All three major maps showed it as open for the first two years after we moved in, a year after the first units in our complex were built.

Waze updated it first, possibly because I kept submitting it as a map edit (Waze allows users to edit the maps, but in recent years they’ve severely curtailed what you can do until you have a certain number of edits under your belt—and it’s virtually impossible to achieve that with the very few things regular users can do). Apple fixed it a few years later.

Google, by comparison, has yet to fix it permanently. It gets fixed to show that it’s closed, then it gets reopened, and closed, and reopened, on a cycle that can be as short as a few weeks or as long as several months. It has yet to stay correct for a full year. Street View has no images of the connector, probably because the roads on both our complex and the neighboring one have signs indicating that they are private roads. The posts blocking the connector are quite visible in the satellite image, though.

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That’s a really good idea for how to shape a route. Definitely going to try this.

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If you want to switch to Waze, they do offer a feature to “avoid difficult intersections”. Might be worth a try.

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You can submit errors to Apple (via the More button on the phone). I have done this many times and Apple usually fixes the problem within a few days or a week. I think with some fixes Apple waits until multiple users point out the error, so it’s worth telling a few friends to also make the suggestion.

I do this frequently. For instance, there’s a ferry across a river near me and often that’s the quickest way to the main highway. Apple Maps insists on routing me 30 miles south to a bridge over the river; it will never suggest the ferry, even though I turned off the “avoid tolls” option. My solution was to create a pin at the ferry location and navigate to there as a stop, and once I’m across the river, the navigation will continue as normal.

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I also like printed maps, but I enjoy using Google Maps or Apple Maps (now that it includes traffic) for planning trips. I live in the Boston less than a mile from the junction of routes 90 and 95, a major traffic bottleneck, so traffic is important in planning any trip. It also lets me play with different routes.

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a mapping app to reroute you around a neighborhood you know better than you can yourself, although it can spot traffic tie-ups from a distance which can help me reroute myself.

Interestingly, Google and Apple Maps show significant difference in maps of a construction hell in my neighborhood. I think Apple is right and Google is wrong, but the active construction area changes from day to day or even hour to hour so I’m not sure who is right.

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You can say it sounds “AI”, but these are fairly deterministic, programmable algorithmic decisions, as long as the information necessary to make the decision is there. These are literally “if-then” questions: If the road is in a residential neighborhood, don’t route the user on that road unless they’re going to a destination in that neighborhood or avoiding it would add more than a specified amount of time and/or distance to the trip. As far as making a decision goes, this is no more difficult than avoiding freeways or toll roads. The hard part isn’t coding the options in: it’s making the necessary classifying information available. That requires either laborious (or crowd-sourced) data gathering, or a machine learning model to determine these traits of a road or intersection based on the data already available. Given that a large amount of the mapping was originally crowd-sourced (especially for Waze and any system that’s based on OpenStreetMap), crowd-sourcing this additional data is probably the best approach. People who live in an area can usually easily tell if a neighborhood is residential, or if an intersection is between a small road and a major arterial, or whatever is needed to make the apps able to make the necessary decisions.

Everybody’s so hopped up about AI these days that it’s easy to forget that complicated decisions can still be made via deterministic algorithms as long as the data involved is quantifiable (numeric, Boolean, or pre-defined strings). The new models like ChatGPT are designed for qualitative judgments, which can be very difficult to program deterministically. Whereas quantitative decisions are what computers have been doing since Babbage first designed the Analytical Engine.

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Just to clarify, when I am planning a route beforehand while using a map, it’s rarely a printed map - I’m generally looking at Apple Maps or Google Maps (sometimes both), which also lets me see local traffic, a zoomed in view, satellite view, etc.

I should say I also do this a lot for running routes when I travel. I know I mentioned the turn by turn I did last weekend with my phone and watch, but almost always I am planning a running route (and here I might use the MapMyRoute website, mostly to get more accurate distance measurements) and I memorize the street names, turns, etc.

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Yea. The gotcha here is that it means I have to know how it intends to route me to do that meaningfully. Which means taking that time I didn’t want to spend before getting moving scrutinizing the route.

Remember, it’s possible that on a given day, it might send me starting 180 degrees different coming out of the parking lot, depending on local traffic. My via point might totally defeat that guidance.

Plus, I’d have to add that via point every single time I drive home.

By telling Maps to avoid a particular left turn, it remains empowered with as much flexibility to pick me the best route, and I never have to tell it a second time. :blush:

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Thanks for the reminder. I used to use Waze. But I find the convenience of just tapping an address and using the default app immeasurably valuable. Or I ask Siri to take me to my next appointment.

Plus, Waze was driving me crazy because it forced me to guess the first few turns or my trip before it could figure out where I was even located. I don’t know if it had a satellite problem or what. Drove me crazy. “Nope, I guessed the wrong way. Now let me u-turn and follow the directions it finally decided to present to me”.

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Do we really need another “Apple Maps Sucks” thread?

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It’s a feature request thread. And there’s been plenty of criticism of Google Maps and Waze, too. All constructive.

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Of course in other parts of the world this would be right hand turns…

Who would determine which are difficult turns? We have a nearby intersection which enters a main road. Sometimes it’d empty and simple, other times it’s full and difficult. No particular reason for either, just how traffic is flowing at that particular second.

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What I’m requesting is for a way the individual user can indicate specific turns to avoid just for them when preparing a route.

Having said this, I was reminded that Waze has “Avoid Difficult Intersections” which may try to make the decision for you. I’m not sure what logic it follows, but it could do something like:

An intersection is “difficult” if:

  • there are no traffic lights, and only one road has stop signs and the other way is busy
  • there ARE traffic lights, but those in one direction rarely turn green
  • crowd source data shows people waiting extraordinarily long to get through the intersection

These are some of the examples I face weekly, and it wouldn’t be hard for software to track this. And if Apple would do so effectively, then I would retract my request to manually indicate certain left turns to avoid (at certain times of day) because they would be doing it for me :star_struck: