Road Worrier: Google Maps and Waze tell us where to go

Free smartphone navigation apps have brought us a long way since the time – just a few years ago – when Triangle commuters bickered with bossy dashboard gizmos that cost $400 and gave advice that sometimes was worth nothing.

Waze is quick to spot trouble and suggest a clever route around it. Truckers, sales reps, students and commuters consider Waze indispensable, and the software maker – an Israeli startup that Google gobbled up for $1 billion last year – claims more than 50 million users.

But Waze has its eccentricities, and its competitors are getting better fast. Now there are a handful of dependable, free apps that can find the nearest ATM or help you get to work on time.

Apple Maps was so awful when it was introduced in 2012 that CEO Tim Cook apologized to users and endorsed his rivals. Now Siri’s voice is a reliable guide for the driver, and the mapping app justifies Apple’s reputation for being easy to use. You can find directions for a trip on your computer before you leave home and then retrieve them from your iPhone with a finger tap, in the car.

I haven’t tried it, but Nokia is earning kudos for a navigation app called HERE. INRIX Traffic provides navigation help with an emphasis on thorough traffic info, including freeway camera images.

The leading alternative to Waze is its corporate sibling app, Google Maps. Google, in its inscrutable wisdom, has kept the two products separate while sharing some of their resources – and this has benefited Google Maps especially.

They’re still different animals. Your choice between Waze and Google Maps may come down to a question of style and your tolerance for digital distraction.

Triangle drivers complained to the Road Worrier back in 2007 and 2008 that their Garmin and TomTom navigation devices were unhelpful in traffic jams and unaware of new highways. Customers paid $50 or more for upgrades and still waited a year or two until their talking gadgets stopped reprimanding them for driving on new stretches of the 540 Outer Loop.

Waze is TomTom’s opposite, in every way.

Waze users make the software smarter by actively reporting crashes and other problems, and by passively reporting their own speeds and positions through the GPS technology that links them together.

Individual users can fix errors in the Waze map database. Before I went online to redraw my little cul-de-sac in rural Orange County, Waze told my friends there was no way they could drive to my house from the nearest state road.

When Waze users ahead of you start slowing down, Waze adds a minute or two to your expected travel time. When they stop, Waze checks your exits and calculates your odds on the side roads.

Sometimes this works like magic, as on a recent evening when Waze warned me away from an Interstate 40 pileup and sent me home on bucolic back roads.

But sometimes Waze is too smart for its own good, as in some secluded Los Angeles neighborhood streets that were clogged with wayward Wazers who had been advised to get off a busy freeway.

“If everybody takes that advice, that’s what’s creating the new traffic jam,” said Scott Carpenter, 48, of Raleigh.

Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in computer science at N.C. State University, where he focuses on the technology that will have all our cars start talking to each other in a few years. Waze helps him dodge the worst freeway congestion on long-distance drives. But for shorter local trips, Carpenter thinks Waze users place too much faith in the collective wisdom of the software and its other users.

My biggest concern is that Waze can be a dangerous distraction when you need to keep your attention on the road. Waze offers annoying alerts about a car on the shoulder ahead, and then invites you to either verify this warning or cancel it.

There’s enough information here to engage a full-time copilot. The Waze screen is sprinkled with cartoonish icons. Its tunnel-vision perspective can rob drivers of a sense of location – and that only accelerates the problems of a society quickly losing its appreciation for actual maps.

Google Maps is still built on good maps. When you need to glance at the screen, you see a clear map with directions that often mimic your freeway signs.

Like Waze and the other apps mentioned here, Google Maps adjusts for traffic congestion, provides smart routes and usually predicts your arrival time with uncanny accuracy. Sometimes where there are other turns you could choose, Google Maps will tell you how much sooner or later you might arrive by the route not taken.

But you can keep your eyes on the road while Google Maps tells you to move into one of the two left lanes, say, in preparation for your next left turn. And depending on what happens after that, Google Maps might advise you on which of those left-turn lanes to use.

That’s hard to beat.

This story was originally published December 29, 2014 at 7:39 PM with the headline "Road Worrier: Google Maps and Waze tell us where to go."