Is Google Map's navigation updated too slowly?

2 points

8 years ago

Last Saturday (19th of March) I was checking the yearly traffic nightmare that germans and swiss-germans go into when they want to have a long weekend in Italy. Every year, many cars queue up on the fastest way to traverse Switzerland to go into Italy. This way is through the Alps, precisely the St Gotthard tunnel. This is a "slow" tunnel, since it is a two way tunnel. During the holidays to avoid major issues, the body responsible for the tunnel prefers to filter cars by stopping them before the tunnel and letting go a certain amount of car per hour. This year there was apparently 25 chilometers of queues from north to south. The reason there were amny more cars than the usual queues (~15km during big holidays) is that another slower tunnel was closed (St. Bernardino).

Now, the reason I post this is that I did check on Saturday afternoon, right into the nightmare time and notice two things: 1. passing through the main tunnel was around 1 hour slower than usual. Highly improbable, but it might be right. I seriously doubt it's right, but I don't have numbers to explain how traffic flows through the tunnel. 2. the second tunnel closed on friday. No one passed through it in the last 24 hours apart for firemen and police. Why google maps was still giving it as a possibility?

I think Google Maps used to have updated traffic data, but now I believe they just focus on places they believe are important and let the rest just update slower. This is of course a big deal, especially if you were a german last saturday and wanted to have a break in Italy.

Note that you can still force it to go through the St Bernardino tunnel even if still closed

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/traffic-problems_major-alpine-road-tunnel-remains-closed-after-coach-fire/44130240