I ride a road bike for 200-300km each week. Sometimes I don't know where I am and need to use Google maps. I use it only for finding out where I am, and then navigate myself. I have zero trust in the recommended routes.
I always choose "Car" as a vehicle so that Google Maps only shows me roads, but you wouldn't believe the number of times that Google maps has recommend me short cuts through 5km long dirt roads or longer. It happens a couple of times per month. With a car those shortcuts might have worked, but with a road bike 5km dirt road is a no go.
Every time I choose "Bicycle" I essentially get recommended 100km of dirt roads. The app is completely useless for road cycling.
Earlier this year I had to travel 1400km with the car each week. I always used Google Maps in an advisory role only - listening to the radio was always a better advisor than Google Maps. Its fastest route algorithm was always reliably wrong. I had the feeling it was always getting stuck in local minima, and it had zero foresight for how traffic works. Just because there is a 10 min traffic jam near to a big city at 5pm when I am still 300 km away does not meant that the jam will still be there in 2-3 hours (7-8pm), and that taking a completely different route that's 50km longer and has a much lower speed limit is going to be faster. No human would make that mistake, but Google maps reliably does.
I wish the App would allow you to select the fastest route independently of traffic, and I wish it would give you the reason for the traffic jams (was there an accident? did they close the highway? etc.).
What I don't understand is how the Navigation apps of other manufacturers (Daimler, VW, BMW, ...) do not have these problems. While driving, I'd see the navigation device in the car telling me a meaningful route, and Google maps telling me to do something completely absurd.
At the end of the day, you are the driver. It's your job to pick up your information sources, and weight them accordingly.
I always choose "Car" as a vehicle so that Google Maps only shows me roads, but you wouldn't believe the number of times that Google maps has recommend me short cuts through 5km long dirt roads or longer. It happens a couple of times per month. With a car those shortcuts might have worked, but with a road bike 5km dirt road is a no go.
Every time I choose "Bicycle" I essentially get recommended 100km of dirt roads. The app is completely useless for road cycling.
Earlier this year I had to travel 1400km with the car each week. I always used Google Maps in an advisory role only - listening to the radio was always a better advisor than Google Maps. Its fastest route algorithm was always reliably wrong. I had the feeling it was always getting stuck in local minima, and it had zero foresight for how traffic works. Just because there is a 10 min traffic jam near to a big city at 5pm when I am still 300 km away does not meant that the jam will still be there in 2-3 hours (7-8pm), and that taking a completely different route that's 50km longer and has a much lower speed limit is going to be faster. No human would make that mistake, but Google maps reliably does.
I wish the App would allow you to select the fastest route independently of traffic, and I wish it would give you the reason for the traffic jams (was there an accident? did they close the highway? etc.).
What I don't understand is how the Navigation apps of other manufacturers (Daimler, VW, BMW, ...) do not have these problems. While driving, I'd see the navigation device in the car telling me a meaningful route, and Google maps telling me to do something completely absurd.
At the end of the day, you are the driver. It's your job to pick up your information sources, and weight them accordingly.