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How Google Maps offers me an alternate route that is longer, slower, eats more fuel, and has tolls on it for some reason
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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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The most generous guess is that it is doing some exploratory investigation of how long the other paths are currently taking. For any navigation app to be very accurate for most users, it needs to be very inaccurate for some users. It won't know that taking this 30 minute detour is worth taking without someone taking that detour and another person sitting through the traffic that made the detour worthwhile. And since traffic changes over time, it would need to continually do that exploration.
Though it wouldn't surprise me if that's not the only factor and that there's some enshitification going on on top of this. One guess in that angle: a special secret VIP mode where people who have given Google a lot of money get people directed away from their route.
Fun points. I don't trust google or crapple or microsoft(bill gates in bed).