Star Simpson

Back home in Hawai’i people debate the relative merits of mapping apps not on the speed of the routes but on the comically bad mispronunciations of street names. “At least this one is not as bad as the other one, which says I live on *garble* street”

People trust mapping apps a lot for good reasons but some who don’t know better now argue that the awful computer pronunciations HAVE to be the canonically correct pronunciation (“that’s how *app producer* says it”) and it’s almost unbearable.

I have regular frustrations with Google Maps biking instructions in Helsinki. The routes are not wrong but they are Dumb.

It’s interesting to contemplate how to solve this problem or at least to do better. Were you writing a mapping app, how would you approach solving this?

Strava already is an improved version, since they have the activity data from their users. No need to encode guesses for how much should the route avoid stoplights and how to weigh the scenery along the way.