Fewer turns but one more Bend.
This is Apple Maps.
Apple Maps doesn’t just recommend the fastest routes, it also appears to push the most popular routes as alternatives.
Here is the San Francisco area to LA in iOS 18. The longer route might seem insane if you’re not familiar with the drive, but that longer route is much prettier, and a lot of people intentionally drive in the coastal road for the views.
Edit: Weird. Lemmy isn’t loading the picture for me. All in all, this is a map of I5 to LA vs the Hyw 101 to LA. I5 is 2 hours faster, but it’s a long brown valley, it smells like cow shit, and you’re bombarded with homemade MAGA signs for several hours. It’s a drive of hate, farts, and truck stop food. 101 longer, but it’s recommended for redwoods forests and cute little beach towns.
California is ridiculous. I’m from San Francisco, was visiting LA and someone asked me where I lived. I pointed to 101 and said, turn left on that road and keep going for 8 hours.
Edit: sorry, “the 101”. When in Rome, etc
Why is the title “Thanks, Google”? Isn’t that Apple Maps?
It is. Apple Maps recommends a combo of the fastest and most popular routes. Sometimes the popular routes are shown as options because they’re nicer.
This goes through Bend Oregon, home of the last Blockbuster on Earth. That’s a solid recommendation IMHO.
Can they add an option to show roads with more twist for us riding a motorbike? I’d love to road trip without having to look too closely at the map for nice roads.
If you use Waze instead, they actually have a setting you can toggle for roads that are more twisty. In my experience it works great!
Might wanna ask them about that directly. I certainly won’t be able to answer that question.
Kurviger is what you’re looking for
There’s a bunch of motorcycle specific apps for people who want to use their phone to navigate (I recommend using an old phone if you plan to mount it to your motorcycle, vibration can kill the camera)
I love that one as well, can be used as a launcher on Android, IIRC you can even use it with two devices so you don’t have to take the SIM out of your good phone.
What I want is specifically “no left turns.” Because that could actually save me time. “Fewer 🚦s” and “no dangerous instructions” would also be good.
How come it tried to send me to make a left onto a major thoroughfare from a tiny side street rather than the major one with a controlled left arrow (a blessed rarity in my city) a few blocks away? Yeah maybe someone did it and scraped a few seconds off their time because they got lucky with the cross traffic, but someone who doesn’t know the area is gonna get tboned.
I don’t want fastest. I want least stressful. No left turns without a traffic light. No really short merges. And if it could find a way to route all the chaotic idiots along some other road, that would be perfect.
