"make legal u-turn where available"

Apple Maps: Our artisanal cartographers hope you enjoy this pleasant journey. 28 mins

Google Maps: Our algorithm has determined an optimal path for the most efficient route given current traffic conditions. 25 mins

Waze: Drive through this dude's living room. 17 mins

--@Victoryoftheppl

Apple Maps vs. Google Maps vs. Waze

I think the link above is pretty neat, but this is mostly an excuse to write up what may have been my first experience with automated directions.

Back in summer 2003 I was visiting the DC area when the second Matrix movie came out, and I arranged to go see it at midnight with a bunch of other people. The theatre we ended up at was a weirdly Egyptian-themed place up in Maryland. I wasn't entirely confident in my ability to navigate outside of Virginia so I pulled up Mapquest and got it to give me directions.

Mapquest routed me through downtown DC, and included "Make a U-turn here" as part of its directions.

I said "This is a terrible idea" and talked to some actual human beings, and got directions that sent me back out and around the Beltway and involved no actual U-turns.

It wasn't until years later that I figured out what had happened. (Any DC-area natives reading this may have figured it out already.) Going through the District was technically faster and certainly shorter than going all the way back out to the Beltway from Arlington (where I was picking up Kelly). And there's a highway that goes through the District, or rather there are like four highways that sort of mostly connect. But, for reasons that I still don't understand and never asked Vval or JMax or Joe-Badmagic about, part of one of them only runs in one direction, so you have to get on (395?) going south and then exit and re-enter going the other direction. "Make a U-turn," yes, but not quite as egregious a U-turn as I'd (reasonably) assumed.

I put this together sometime after I got sick of driving around the Beltway at rush hour on Monday afternoons to get to my counseling appointments and tried to cut through the District instead. Which turned out to be a lot more pleasant of a drive than the Beltway, because the last twenty minutes or so were on the very pretty Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and the traffic for the rest of it was no worse than a bad Beltway day. The various ways the roads interconnected were pretty confusing the first couple of times, though. Anyway, by then it was possible to go north without making a U-turn, although if I'd tried coming back south I believe I still would have needed to do so.

No point, no moral. Just reminiscing.