20250226-crmap.txt

I live in a society...well, actually a medium-sized city, whatever that means. My typical commute from work takes me right through downtown...at the early stage of rush hour... Sometimes, the commute is tolerable, nice even. Other times it takes me twice as long to get home as it takes to get to work. This results in fits of cursing from me. It's generally because people who drive are fucking stupid and/or not paying attention.

Anyway, there is an alternate rout which takes me around the city an interstate highway. This takes about twice the miles, but takes the same time, give or take 2 minutes. This, to me, is fucking bananas. I mean it makes sense when you take into account the speed, but it still feels wrong. The only reason I take this route is if I'm feeling impatient and don't want to sit in still downtown traffic for about 10 minutes total (that doesn't include slow-moving traffic).

Since I rarely take this route, I wanted to make sure I had the route down. Maps from the Big G is like a security blanket when traveling for me, a darn near necessity. I tried Open Streetmaps once: it did not go as well as I'd hoped as one of the roads I use did not exist. This is a long-winded way of saying I was looking for this alternate route to my home through the mainstream map application. Before, the app had given me the option to take the highway. It wasn't a great option, but it was there. Something changed, either in the logic of the program or the app update: it no longer shows that alternate route. That's bull crap for a map app.

How did it come to this? I understand loosely what nodes are and how the route is calculated, but I can't think of anything that would cause this behavior outside of downloading offline maps... I still don't think that should affect the route logic, but I'm not sure. How exactly do map applications get worse?