Saturday, July 11, 2009

Google Maps needs a little help with their math...

I had to make a trip to Ionia from Mount Pleasant this morning. I had to be in Ionia at about 9:45am. So I jumped on to Google Maps and punched in my address and got directions to Ionia. The first route it suggested was south on 127 to M-21 and West into Ionia from there. I didn't feel like taking the highway so I moved the route to take M-20 West out of Mount Pleasant to M-66 South out of Remus. Google Maps then told me this:





Wow, 2 hours and 12 minutes... well I wasn't thinking too clearly about this last night so I set my alarm for 7am and planned to get on the road about 7:30.

While I'm on the road, I see a sign saying "Ionia 45 miles"... at 8:10 in the morning. At that rate, I was bound to hit Ionia at about 9am! Whoops... Sure enough, I'm in a coffee shop in Ionia right now, got into town at least 45 minutes early, it really only took me about an hour and 15 minutes to get here. I looked up the directions again and now I've realized Google's error, it's figuring an average speed of about 30 miles per hour! They must expect me to get stuck behind every tractor in Montcalm county...

Oh well, better early then late I suppose!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah you always gotta check the math on Google Maps... It was like that when I was planning routes for the drive to Alaska also...

Sopor said...

Y'know... I don't think I'll use Google Maps anymore. Yahoo gave me a better route right from the get-go: Shorter and faster than even the M-20 to M-66 route I took! AND it calculated the time correctly!