Google Maps should have a Low Stress mode
• 5 min read
I’ve noticed Google Maps will sometimes send me a way that saves a minute or two but is a lot more annoying to drive. It takes me off the highway, through a bunch of turns in a neighborhood, onto a busy road where I have to get over a few lanes right away, and then has me make a left across traffic with no light. It’s technically faster. I’d happily take the extra two minutes to skip all that.
The reason is pretty simple. Maps is optimizing for time, and it does that really well. But that’s not how I experience a drive. I experience the turns and the merges and the moments where I have to make a decision, and some of those decisions are easy to get wrong. Two routes can have the same ETA and feel completely different to drive.
What I’d want is a low-stress option. Get me there reasonably quickly, but with fewer decisions, especially the ones where messing up is bad. That’s different from avoiding highways, since the highway is often the easiest way to go. It’s not a scenic route either. And when Maps picks a slower route, it should tell me why, something like “3 min slower, 8 fewer turns, avoids 2 difficult left turns.” Then I can decide if it’s worth it.
It’s not a safety mode, but the two overlap more than I expected. In NHTSA’s crash causation study, a left turn was the critical move before 22.2% of crashes, compared with 1.2% for right turns. And the FHWA puts the fatality rate on local roads 75% higher per mile than on interstates. So the two minutes Maps saves by pulling me off the highway and through an unprotected left isn’t just more annoying. It’s often the riskier drive too. Even without any personalization, a sensible low-stress option would be better for most people most of the time.
Under the hood, routing already gives every road a cost, and today that cost is mostly time. You could add a second cost for how hard each turn or merge is, and let the driver set how much they care about that versus speed. A right turn at a light would cost almost nothing. An unprotected left across a busy road, or a merge that leaves you a few hundred feet to get across three lanes, would cost a lot. It doesn’t need a perfect definition of stress. It just needs to tell an obviously simple route from an obviously messy one, and a map that already shows you lanes, traffic lights and stop signs has a lot to work with. UPS famously built its routing around avoiding left turns, so treating turns as a cost and not just distance isn’t a new idea.
The part I find most interesting is learning what stresses each person out. Maps already sees how I drive. If it keeps telling me to make an unprotected left and I keep going to the next light instead, that’s a signal. If it suggests a shortcut and I stay on the highway anyway, that’s another one. Any one time could be noise, maybe I was stopping for coffee, but over a few months it looks like a preference.
I should also be able to just tell it. “I hate unprotected lefts, highways are fine, and I’m worse at night.” Or for a specific trip, “I’m tired,” “I don’t know this city” or “the kids are in the back.” A parent could make it the default for a teenager who just got their license. An LLM can turn that into weights for the route, and my actual driving keeps it honest. Gemini in Maps already takes voice commands while you drive, like “avoid tolls” or “show alternative routes,” but it only reaches the same few settings. The conversation is already there. The routing just doesn’t have anything like this to plug into.
Google already has a lot of the pieces. Waze, which Google bought in 2013, has had an “avoid difficult intersections” setting since 2016, which started with lists of bad intersections that local map editors picked by hand. When fuel-efficient routing is on, Google Maps says it weighs “route simplicity” along with traffic. And this year’s Immersive Navigation update is all about taking the guesswork out of driving, with 3D lanes and traffic lights, a wider view before tricky turns, and explanations of the tradeoffs between routes, like less traffic or a toll. All of that makes a route easier to follow once Maps has picked it. The route itself is still picked mostly on time, and simplicity isn’t one of the tradeoffs it explains.
If I were on that team, I wouldn’t start with a new mode. I’d add “fewer turns” to the tradeoffs Maps already shows, surface the simpler route when there is one, and see how often people pick it. Google can already see how often drivers skip a left it told them to make and go on to the next light, which seems like a good place to start measuring.
Maps is really good at finding the fastest route. I’d like it to get better at finding mine.