it took me 10 months to get behind it. Last year some time I recognized my google maps sometimes giving me really strange route suggestions but I thought maybe google really knows the best efficient way without really questioning it. As I am really bad geography I just drove what google said. Sometimes the ride was so long that I used Apple Maps or Waze. And often did I ride and thought jeez, how is this highway closed again or has so much traffic that it is taking me on another route. Background, last July i was on a motorbike trip and wanted more beautiful chilled routes.
Tl;dr 10 month did I take much longer routes google maps routes because I turned off highways before a motorbike trip. I suspected that google a) knows better or that the highway is shut or has a lot of traffic (again). Only today did I realiseš¹
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Oh man, I really get it, once routed myself through a whole neighborhood just because I didn’t realize it was an option!
Youāre not alone. Not 10 months, but avoid tolls took me miles out of my way for several weeks.
Are you me? I did it myself recently for a good 6 months.. I was doing 30 minutes drives in an hour and 15… lol
Edit: extra bonus, when I figured it out I still had toll roads turned off for an extra 3 months. I live in Pennsylvania that has a metric shit ton of toll roads… double smh
This happened to me a few years ago. Honestly, I have no idea when I actually changed the setting. We had recently moved to a new city, and I was so annoyed by how long it took to go anywhere. One day, I was meeting my gf at a museum (we would normally drive together). On the way home, she beat me back by like 30 minutes. I was in shock she got home so fast and asked to see which way she took. And that is how I found out how much time I was wasting driving on side roads for God knows how long
Drove backroads for 10 months thinking Google was smart, highways were disabled the whole time
I did this too, but in a foreign country. My wife kept asking why it took so long to get around everywhere and why we kept taking small country roads through little towns. I just assumed thatās how it was.
At least now youāve got some beautiful extra miles under your belt. Just donāt let Google convince you that you need a road trip to the moon next time.
I do wish that we could select those options for the current trip. I suppose that the difficulty would then be in pushing those options to all devices which you choose to use for the trip.
LPT: if you ever need to find the secret entrance to Pine Knob Ampitheatre, turn off highways on maps.
there is a dirt road back entrance (and exit on a good night) that saves loads of time over the highway main entrance.
It is totally wild to me how some people never actually look at the map. Beyond that, they are often completely non-geographic in their cognition, in the same way that some people are colorblind. It’s probably an understudied form of learning disability. The world is just a black void of floating disjointed points.
I do a lot of land deals, and sometimes people can’t even interpret a screenshot of their own property with high res satellite imagery. You have to show them in person.
Had the same thing happen, gave a dispatcher our arrival time based on no highways. First fuel stop figured it out, showed up three hours early with 5 resources oppise doodleā¦
They really need to make an option to do this for a set period of time. I did the same thing with avoid tolls for a while, because locally itāll take me a route that saves maybe 2 minutes and costs 3 dollars and is extremely not worth it.
I did this as well…i traveled frequently for work….like…flynt o a place…rent a car…drive to work site….so anytime I used GPS I was not in a familiar place….
I just made a trip from south Florida to Tennessee and when I departed I turned on Waze and just reflexively started the route not realizing I had turned off freeways because I was doordashing. Almost ended up driving 400ish extra milesš¤¦āāļø
I did this once.
Spent a few months wondering how the freeway was somehow always slower than city streets when I was driving.
Eventually figured out that when I went through the settings and played around with ‘no highways’ and ‘no toll routes’ settings I forgot to set it all back to normal again.
Yep I had a trip I did recently where I didnāt realize until I was almost to my destination that I had avoided highways at some point. Stupid. Glad you figured it out.
LOL.. i did that on vacay.. driving back to CA from New Mexico FFS. i turned it on because in town, i like to see stuff on side streets..
forgot to turn it off and headed back to CA.. next thing you know it’s tumbleweeds for miles… didn’t see another car for 30 mins.
had to backtrack to get “back to” the interstate.
after many situations where I didn’t listen to google and got stuck in traffic or a closed road, I decided never to question it’s ability to direct me.. and I did this exact same thing for quite a while not realizing it.
One time I accidentally had it set to biking directions and didn’t realize until the third time it tried to tell me to turn at a spot that was clearly not for cars to take me off the busy road with no bike lane. I was confused why it was telling me a 5 minute drive (on the highway and major roads) would take almost 40 minutes. I didn’t have a bicycle at the time so didn’t even consider it might not be set to driving lol
I have avoid highways turned off on purpose. I would rather drive for a bit longer than have to deal with the chaos on the highways where I live. The side roads are bad enough the highways here are basically Mad Max.
Highway driving has been a shit experience since 2020, so it might be doing you a favor honestly.
This happens so often because the user isn’t focusing on the route options when searching for a route. It would probably help to have something like a big red symbol of a crossed highway, to be more visually prominent that that option is turned on. Happened to me as well, multiple timesĀ
Done something like that on a cross country trip where somehow toll roads got turned off
I think all y’all might be regarded š
I didn’t know you could do that, but now I’m tempted to make the same mistake
My first car that had GPS built in, was delivered with “avoid toll roads” enabled. In New Jersey.
I once drove from Ventura California to Philadelphia Pennsylvania and made it all the way to Ohio before I realized I had āavoid tollsā turned on. Ā I feel you brother.
I did this for motorcycle trips and forgot to turn it off when I got back in my car. But I realized it pretty quickly.
āI took the road less travelledā
I always leave that feature on locally because the highways are always backed-up with traffic and semi trucks and the toll ways are like $2 for only a 5 minute faster commute. No fucking thanks, Iāll cruise through some neighborhoods and not worry reckless morons flying 80mph while texting.
Don’t blame yourself, blame Google.
The crap you have to go through to change “no highways” or “no tolls” is ridiculous. I have almost gotten into accidents trying to change over. And if I’m in a traffic jam trying to find an alternate route – I should be able to do that with a TAP, not having to go into settings.
But I can easily change the color of my map with one tap…. because THAT’S important. š Whoever did the UX on this part of maps is a moron.
If the toggle to change “avoid highways” were somewhere that made ANY sense (like where the MAP COLOR button is), you probably would have noticed sooner.
It’s Google’s fault. š
It’s wild to me that people don’t… learn the routes they need to drive.
I have never used Google Maps because I just look for where I have to go.
I’m a driver for a grocery store, delivering people’s online orders. We don’t have assigned work phones or trucks, it’s a first come thing. Anyway, one of the drivers always turns off highways on whatever phone she grabs because she hates driving on them & another driver who consistently changes the icon on his phone to a purple truck.
I too have done this. I only noticed when typing in a long road trip and the time was like 16 hours instead of the expected 8ish. My wife was so mad, but at least we had been seeing some pretty scenery on the roads less traveled
Google really needs to improve their highway/toll preferences. I prefer back roads but not if it’s going to 30% longer. At the same time I’ve had Google send me through a $2 toll to save 1 minute. There has got to be better optimization.
I live in a city and bike everywhere, so I had it turned off for that and naturally forgot about it. Then I rented a car to drive somewhere that was 6 hours away and wondered why it was telling me 13+ hours. “I could bike it in that time!” Oh, right, that’s what the map thinks that I’m trying to do…