Mapquest Driving Directions

Mapquest, like Tom Tom and other GPS devices, has no common sense. Obviously these items are computers and not real people. But where are the real people involved? In something such as driving directions, shouldn't we get competent ones?

I was making a search one day to get to my family's cottage that I had not been to before. Not really looking at the results, I just printed them out so we could go. When I did finally look at the map of our route, it had us loop up around our destination just to come back to it. What?! This doesn't make logical sense. We went over 15 miles out of the way of our destination because Mapquest didn't know any better.

Later on when we got home, I thought to myself, "there must be some sort of input I missed to have screwed this up." I thought it was my fault. Because, essentially, computers are only as smart as their users. So I returned myself to Mapquest to research this better. Clicking on all I could click, I could only make the directions worse, not better. Your choices are "shortest time" or "shortest distance". Shortest time takes you basically highway to highway zig zagging you there on the fastest road the computer thinks. Shortest distance is like a 5 year old's directions... you want to go from here to there, OK, and draw a straight line. Doesn't matter if you're going to be going through a corn field or not.

So what could Mapquest, or other GPS systems, do to improve this? I think this could be the next biggest job for the unemployed. Ignoring gas prices and all, regular old Joe's who drive these routes you are looking to take could report the real fastest way to get from point A to point B and earn a small living off of it. I'm sure Mapquest makes enough in advertising revenue to support such a thing. And for Pete's sake, my fiance used to be a truck driver... and the directions he would receive from dispatchers was atrocious! Let's put America to work looking for directions. Sounds cool to me :)