On my way to Kennedy International Airport, I grip the wheel tightly, swerving across three lanes of expressway traffic at 50 miles per hour to reach the exit. Minutes later, still shaken from my move, I hear a cheerful, disembodied voice instructing me to re-enter the expressway I had just exited.

I curse at my phone.

If you use a navigation app, you probably have felt helpless anger when your stupid phone endangers your life, and the lives of all the drivers around you, to potentially shave a minute or two from your drive time. Or maybe it’s stuck you on an ugly freeway when a glorious, ocean-hugging alternative lies a few miles away. Or maybe it’s trapped you on a route with no four-way stops, ignoring a less stressful solution that doesn’t leave you worried about a car barreling out of nowhere.

For all the discussion of the many extraordinary ways algorithms have changed our society and our lives, one of the most impactful, and most infuriating, often escapes notice. Dominated by a couple of enormously powerful tech monopolists that have better things to worry about, our leading online mapping systems from Google and Apple are not nearly as good as they could be.

You may have heard the extreme stories, such as when navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps apparently steered drivers into lakes and onto impassable dirt roads, or when jurisdictions beg Waze to stop dumping traffic onto their residential streets. But the reality is these apps affect us, our roads and our communities every minute of the day. Primarily programmed to find the fastest route, they endanger and infuriate us on a remarkably regular basis.

Worse, the promised time savings are often a mirage. There are so many elements included in calculating a route that the estimated time is always a guess. Yet who among us has not seen her estimated arrival time change several times while en route?

These products should be calibrated with greater acknowledgment of the uncertainties involved in predicting unexpected slowdowns and road closures. I am firmly of the belief - which I cannot prove, as our tech overlords refuse to share data with us - that the algorithms are often optimising for time savings that are wider than their margin of error.

I shouldn’t dismiss the fact that digital maps have been transformational and empowering. My father, a mathematician and mapmaker, helped build the first digital maps for early GPS navigation systems. When map apps arrived on my phone, we put away paper maps with a sigh of relief.

Now, however, we have all become so reliant on online maps that we have lost the deep knowledge that allows us to make our own calculations of an optimal route. And these maps don’t seem to have changed very much since Google bought its competitor Waze; the company now commands an estimated more than 80% of the navigation app market share. (Google has prevailed, so far, in a long-running antitrust effort claiming it abused its map monopoly.)

It doesn’t have to be like this. A navigation app could consider factors such as the safety impact of changing many lanes with little notice. Imagine instructing the app to avoid jumping on and off highways, or to take the scenic route if the added driving time is under 10%. To be clear, this type of customisation is possible. Porsche offers in its navigation app a choice of routes “tailored to your driving style”, defined as “curvy”, “fast” or “balanced”. The open source project Valhalla offers dozens of ways to optimise routing algorithms with options such as prioritising fewer turns or routes with car pool lanes. (Unfortunately, it’s too difficult technically for most laypeople to use.)

“It would be wonderful if the primary infrastructure that drives our society was built with the right values - it’s just not,” says Mikel Maron, a geographer and longtime contributor to OpenStreetMap, the so-called Wikipedia of maps, which is built by volunteers and whose data provides a base layer for many other maps and navigation apps.

On a recent trip to Chicago, I couldn’t get my app to offer me the option to take the beautiful Lake Shore Drive on Lake Michigan along my route. It only offered me the Dan Ryan Expressway, a 14-lane leviathan. Sure, it was theoretically a minute or two faster, but it is also an unpleasant experience filled with 18-wheelers and prone to accidents and slowdowns.

The best hope for competition relies on the success of OpenStreetMap. Its data underpins most maps other than Google, including Amazon, Facebook and Apple, but it is so under-resourced that it only recently hired paid systems administrators to ensure its back-end machines kept running.

For a vibrant consumer navigational ecosystem to emerge, society needs to invest in OpenStreetMap as a public good. The giant corporations that rely on its maps should stop freeloading and use some of their hundreds of billions of dollars to support the project. City planners should dedicate staffers to updating their roads and bridges on OpenStreetMap. Communities should submit updates with roads and hazards in their local areas.

In addition, we can promote competition by using the few available alternatives. To navigate cities with public transit, try apps such as Citymapper that offer bike, transit and walking directions. Or use the privacy-focused Organic Maps.

And when you have to use a popular driving app, take its directions with a huge grain of salt.

 - TNS