1: I bet sometimes you do. If you’ve been driving on US-1-15-501, and 1 splits from 15-501, you may ask which highway to keep following. I know of several junctions like that where “go straight” is an ambiguous instruction, especially if one or more lanes just become an “exit.”

2: In many cases I doubt it’s about you. It’s a layered problem.

First of all, you have the United States Highway “system.” 50 state DOTs each doing things their own way with their own goofy ideas and quirks, some roads designed in the 1740s designed by British or Dutch farmers for pedestrians and horses, some roads designed by wildlife that used to walk through the forest that used to be where this town is now and the people put the roads where the tracks were when they put a village in the forest, some roads that are the way they are because they used to follow a railroad that used to be here, some roads designed by people in the 1950s who were going to revolutionize travel for the atomic age, so your nuclear powered car could whisk you down the highway at 190 miles per hour. And every single piece of this for over 3 centuries now has been done as half-assed as possible, each new layer connecting to all the previous layers as an afterthought.

Describe an entire continent of the above fuckeduppery in software please. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s only 300 million people in the United States, please implement this for Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia while you’re at it in the same software.

And remember, you’re designing this software for EVERYONE. You’re designing a system to be used by my uncle who has a hatred of Sheetz that borders on religious fervor because you order food in there with touch screen menus. You’re designing a system for the idiot who drove into a pond because the GPS told him to “turn left immediately.” You’re designing a system for the professional driver who knows that I-295 is an auxiliary interstate that diverges from I-95 that will eventually rejoin I-95. And you’re designing a system for people who mostly know their home town and could get most of the way there but they haven’t been out to the warehouse district a lot so you’ll have to give them directions from the highway to the UPS distribution center.

Everybody from the iOS native zoomer to my 1960’s uncle uses Google Maps. You can’t design things that make sense to both of these people.

=====

So some drivers will want some information some of the time. So at the city limits of Daytona Beach, your phone will mysteriously tell you to continue straight on State Route 92 because that’s where it stops being called International Speedway Boulevard. Because the non-sentient algorithm deciding when to issue verbal directions often can’t tell the difference between a name change and an intersection of two roads. Or even when it can, it may still offer that change to prevent confusing drivers later, because “Turn left onto International Speedway Boulevard.” 20 minutes later “Continue following State Route 92.” “Wait! I thought I was on ISB! How’d I get on 92? *looks down at phone for 3 entire minutes trying to get the least optimized software in history to scroll the map in a way that makes sense, running over every single toddler in Volusia county in the meanwhile.”

So occasionally it will err on the side of caution and tell you something you might not need to know.

Thank you. I’m not actually that old-school, but back in the day, the only directions that mattered were the changes. “Turn right on the dirt road, and follow it for about 35 miles. Turn right at the crazy magenta and black diner…”