Why is Mapquest so sucky?
 

Who decides what goes into that website so-called service anyway?

I had to go to Orange from Huntington Beach. Here is what Mapquest told me to do:

22 East to the 5 north to the 57 north to the 22 east to the 55 north, off a Chapman.

Here is what it should have said: 22 east to the 55 north off at Chapman.

I mean, WTF??!!??

MapQuest sent me through a toll booth once to get to NirvanaMan's house. Dirty bastards.
:D

Did you try local.google.com? I haven't used mapquest in a good long time.

maps.google.com

You can also mess around with the route on the map and it recalculates driving times and distances.

I wouldn't use Mapquest if it gave me perfect directions and rubbed my feet at the same time. The fact that I can't simply pan and zoom the map as easily as I can in Google maps is a major annoyance.

Mapquest wanted me to drive through the south side of Chicago.

Hmmm, maybe I should try google maps if you can move around the map easier. I just never had a problem with mapquest, because i never used it for directions, only for maps. I'm the type of person who doesn't rely on anyone - man, beast or computer - for directions. I prefer to find the most economic route myself.


So I won't want directions from google maps either, but easier map navigation would be better to assist with travel navigation.

Well, for a route that exits at Chapman, Google Maps doesn't even put you on 22.

As for why Mapquest sucks, they don't build their own database of road information they buy it from vendors, just like Google does. Apparently Mapquest's vendor has that interchange description fubared.

I haven't used Mapquest in years so I have no sense how much it really sucks.

Yeah, I used Google maps (I think) when it popped up conected to some event I was going to. I remember that I could click on a different road I prefered to use and it re-routed my trip. I like that, but couldn't remember what service that was. Thanks for the reminder!

I'm going to delete Mapquest and replace it with google maps. But most of the time I ues my Thomas guide, although it is 5 years old and needs to be replaced. I have been waiting for the new construction to slow down. Other than the work on the 5 (which I try to avoid anyway) I think its safe to buy one now.

So they buy the info, huh? I wondered who decided how the trip would be planned.

It also occured to me that the trip through the Orange Crush had to be changed due to connecter roads to different freways being closed durring the 22 rebuild. This may have something to do with the info I got.

A computer calculates the trips.

They buy the data on what roads exist, where they are, what direction they (if one way, for example), the speed limit, etc.

Then computers use some very complex route selecting algorithms to predict the most efficient route. Thousands of routes may quickly be evaluated (gross oversimplification) for a given request and they won't always get it right.

In this case, since Mapquest did give the right route (Google Maps switched between the one I linked to and the one you gave depending on the exact address in Orange used as the destination), it just screwed up the description of the path through the 5/22/57 interchange and I suspect that is a defect in the vendor data, not their own.

The directions mapquest gave you are technically correct. There interchange there has lanes on the right that allow you to exit onto the 5N, or the 57N, or, stay on the 22E. It's just having you go through those lanes rather than stay to the left.

That's what I figured out, but was so strange to me that I figured it had me on the trasition road for a transition. Why make it so difficult for the public??

As Alex said, it's not a conscious decision, it's a programmatic quirk.

The way these route-calculating algorithms work (in very simplified terms) is that every road, every turn, every transition is assigned a weight that indicates a relative "cost" of taking that route over another. Assigning that weight is a complex process, and that's what Mapquest pays those providers for. So for whatever reason, in the data the Mapquest buys, those transition lanes carry a lower "cost" of travel than the freeway-proper.

Knowing that transition well, as I drive it nearly every day, it could be that the average speed along the transition road is faster than the average freeway speed. Or it could be that it might cut out a few dozen yards of driving distance. Or some other combination of the many factors that go into those value assignments.

The thing is, the exercise of driving-route-optimization is a highly complex and nigh unsolvable problem in the world of computer programming. There is actually no way to solve perfectly without requiring an amount of processing power that grows exponentially with the number of routing options. So these programs are forced to take shortcuts and make assumptions. They're pretty good at it, but there will inevitably be some holes in the logic. Google maps is sure to have its share somewhere. Though of course gmap's on-the-fly route changing features make them a little easier to account for when they do happen.

Ok, well then it isn't an issue of the underlying data but rather the logic of the computer.

I would guess this happened because the route described is slightly shorter than just staying to the left on 22 and so far as it knows all other things are equal (speed limit primarily) so it is technically the faster route. But I couldn't say for sure.

OT: Keep reading the thread title is "Why is Mapquest so sticky?"

Just sayin'...

:D I read the same think when I came back to it....and I wrote the dang thing!

Knowing where you live I thought you'd have some insight on the local part. Because of all the work on the 22 I have been driving from Brookhurst up Chapman all the way past the 55 to our Dr.s office. Now that the work is done I thought I'd try the freeway.

Great info on how this works. It seems like the quirks happen for me more often than not....

In my experience, Mapquest seems to have these weird quirks more than Google Maps

But at least with google maps you can manipulate the the trip to change it to meet your needs.

Anyway, I suggest checking a map like Thomas guide to verify the directions before leaving.