When I lived and worked in SF I could drive and park in fifteen minutes... or I could get there in about an hour and a half, best-case, using a bus, the muni, and the bus again. Or probably walk for an hour or so. It's nice when it works for you, but if it doesn't then it often doesn't work spectacularly.
It looks an awful lot like roads,
Rail is better than roads because it doesn't involve tires. Tires are awful. Doesn't have to be Skytran, but we should be using rails.
but less versatile.
The vehicles are less versatile, but the tracks can go places roads can't, period the end, let alone places roads can't go cost-effectively.
The problem is that everybody wants to go to work at the same time, and thus you'd need a lot of SkyTran vehicles.
One solution to this problem is to permit people to have personal SkyTran (or whatever PRT) vehicles. They get regular inspections like vehicles in much of Europe and unlike vehicles in most of the USA, and no problem. Any successful rail-based PRT system also needs push-pull-ability, though; any vehicle needs to be able to push not just itself but also another vehicle. You also need to be able to "back" a tow "vehicle" (needn't resemble a car at all, or even be manned) down the track to retrieve failed vehicles, for those times when multiple vehicles fail. But it's all doable. PRT with only public vehicles is probably a non-starter.
A better solution is not having to travel at all, or not all at the same time.
That would be great, but there's also a lot of reasons why it's advantageous to have everyone at work at the same time.
I believe that the software that UPS drivers use *does* optimize away from left turns. Not for this reason but because you wait forever to make one.
UPS optimizes away from left turns to save money. It saves fuel.
But this doesn't work on a point-to-point trip as the left turn will be faster.
Right, the goal is to minimize the impact of driving on/for everyone, not just you. It makes a better world if we're considerate.
So you always drive at a speed such that your full-stopping distance never exceeds 12 feet?
If you're going around a corner which is crowded with pedestrians too fast to stop if one of them should step off of the corner, then you're going too fast. You decelerate as you approach the corner, and you accelerate again as you leave it. You also pay attention to road conditions. It's not rocket surgery.
Honestly it seems goddamned retarded that the software doesn't already try to optimize away left turns.
Absolutely, clearly this is a trivial problem
Don't be a tool. Nobody said that, including me. Google is so proud of maps, though, perhaps they should earn that pride. It's gotten a lot harder to use, the least they could do is try not to get you t-boned
Nobody wants to eat anything that comes out of the gulf
Sometimes you look both ways and it is clear and while crossing the street someone still zooms through on a left turn and nearly hits you.
Then you were crossing the street someplace you weren't supposed to, and I don't mean by the law, I mean if you love life and want to keep living it. You're supposed to cross at an intersection if possible, and if not, at least where you have a clear line of sight in both directions. You're also supposed to wait until it's safe to cross. If you can't see if it's safe to cross, you're doing it wrong. The driver may have been an asshole in every one of these situations, and yet you're still acting like a fool.
For a child they are smaller and even more likely to get hit.
And that's why it's even more important to teach them to stay out of the fucking road, like my mom did for me.
I can't wait for the day when humans are no longer permitted to drive.
That's too bad, because it's probably a long time off.
Because they say "three rights equal a left"? Or isn't it the exact opposite: more turns to the right?
Sometimes a left turn earlier in the process will eliminate several later on. It might cost you more time, but at peak traffic times, it might also save you time — or at least cost you little time while significantly increasing traffic safety for everyone around you — and also improving trip times for everyone else because you're not holding anyone up while trying to make a left in an annoying location, where it's not protected and with its own lane for example.
Of course, you can't lay all the blame on Google; it's possible or even probable that the timing of the lights and the allocations of particular lanes to particular directions and so on is suboptimal. So rather than simply asking Google to change their algorithms, they should also be asking them where they can improve their traffic routing, because Google probably knows more about that than anyone.
That it's completely untestable?
You can still work backwards; what was done, what happened. And then, you can also observe events. What is being done, what happens.
Honestly this seems like perfectly reasonable user feedback concerning a use case that was not considered by the developers.
Honestly it seems goddamned retarded that the software doesn't already try to optimize away left turns. Everyone and their mother knows, for example, that UPS does this. They do it to save fuel, but it also improves safety.
Not for safety reasons, but because I don't want to sit there for 15 minutes waiting for a car that weighs enough to pull up behind me to trigger the lights to turn green.
They're not scales, dude. They're metal detectors. Stop sitting right in the middle of the lane, where you shouldn't be anyway, and park over the detector.
They personalize search results. Why not directions?
They're too busy figuring out the next way to shit up the maps interface with more idiotic changes.
BTW, did you notice this story is literally NYC asking Google Maps to have a leftward bias?
No, but I did notice the exact opposite of that.
Theology is really a component of the study of cultures.
Right, so what about that isn't science?
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
