What’s up with Routing?
Last week I had a number of opportunities in Dallas to ride both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Google’s Waymo.
One thing was very obvious: the routing is not only “bad” but seems designed to intentionally skip certain intersections. Each car’s routing did contortions to avoid the lighted intersection at Lemmon and Inwood, as well as Mockingbird and Inwood, diverting on stupid jaunts through residential streets instead of the simplest and easiest path. Most interest. If you ask Google Maps for the directions as if you were driving, it easily chose the straightest path including g through these intersections.
Is it possible that both companies have identified intersections that perhaps statistically have more accidents, and they are having their cars simply avoid them so they don’t get hit and it gets counted against them? Why would the routing be so very different between Google Maps, and what Waymo does?