Today I confronted a limitation of Google Maps. I’m in Buena Park and I need to be in downtown LA around 8AM. Last night, I consulted Google Maps on my iPhone for planning purposes. It answered 31 minutes. I also checked in a browser on my laptop, in case a feature existed that would let me choose a departure or arrival time that accounted for Monday morning’s typical traffic. There is no such feature.
Because of LA’s infamous traffic, I gave us 2 hours to assure we arrived on time. I also consulted Google Maps at 6:00AM when we departed. It offered up 38 min with traffic accounted for. I checked again after arrival and Google Maps predicts 55 minutes. The actual time: 77 minutes.
Perhaps the Google Maps time estimates are typically reasonable in typical cases and LA traffic is an edge case that is poorly handled (as I learned several times in the past week). However, I think this is a limitation of how Google calculates traffic times. It only accounts for traffic as it is at this moment. It doesn’t account for the typical traffic patterns that predictably recur on given days of the week.
This is where other competitors such as Waze and hopefully the new iOS maps app can offer a significant advantage by mining crowd sourced data to make much better predictions. This is almost certainly something we’ll see in a future version of Google Maps.