Montreal City Weblog

Kate 19:19 on 2026-02-16 Permalink Reply  

• CE 10:51 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  When driving on the 20 to the airport, the highway signs switch back and forth when they indicate Trudeau or Mirabel airports. I wonder how many people have just looked for the airplane symbol and have turned off toward Mirabel and missed their flights at Trudeau.

• Joey 11:05 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  TVA says they wind up at the fire service office at the airport… Uber also loves to send drivers down snow-filled and ice-covered back alleys to avoid spending 15 seconds waiting for a red light to change, especially when the alley is actually closed at the supposed exit point… to think cabbies used to have to know where everything was.

• MarcG 11:13 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Interesting to reflect back and see how GPS driving directions were early AI destroyers of knowledge.

• Ian 11:57 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Yes and no, using Waze has shown me some really good routes I would never have considered. It’s also really handy if there’s been an accident or roadwork up ahead that you can detour to avoid. FWIW Waze did get bought out by Googel but maintained its live user input so is a lot more accurate.

• MarcG 12:47 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Thinking about the increasingly frequent phenomenon of making conversation with someone who has an interest in a subject and you want to hear what they have to say about it… and they suggest that you just look it up on the internet. A literally dehumanizing enterprise. (Or maybe people are just fucking exhausted).

  On the other side of the map-apps-are-useful ledger, I have to fight with them to not send me over the tracks in St-Henri because as far as I can tell they don’t consider the train schedules and I could end up rotting there for 20 minutes, and the other day there was a backup on the 20 and it directed a bunch of us to an offramp, only to send us right back on again after properly clogging up the local overpass, presumably in order to shave a few seconds off the total trip time.

• Kate 14:13 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  No app completely compensates for knowledge of the situation on the ground.

• Joey 14:50 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  @Kate no, but these algorithms are supposed to learn, right? Like you’d expect that after the Nth driver did not complete the route because the alley is closed at one end, the algorithm would adjust and conclude that the route is never going to work. Same for railway crossings – a true learning machine should be able to anticipate the likelihood that a train is coming. I wish these apps would allow you to designate a preferred route for regular trips and only suggest alternatives if the ETA is more than, say, 5% shorter.

• MarcG 15:28 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Not only do they not learn on their own but it can be frustratingly difficult to get changes made manually. When visiting Parc national du Lac-Témiscouata a few years ago, Google maps told me that the drive to a trailhead would be 20 minutes or so – it turns out the map had detected a bushwacking trail which wasn’t actually a road and it ended up taking way, way longer, especially because I trusted the directions and wasted a bunch of time circling around trying to find it. I told the park staff and they said they’re aware of the problem and have repeatedly asked Google to fix it. I just looked now and they’ve fixed *that* problem, but it now directs you down a different non-car-friendly-path which seems to be some sort of logging road. I wonder if the person I spoke to at the park has any hair left.

• SMD 16:08 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  @MarcG I was there this summer and ran into the same issue. They now have a sign saying “Don’t trust Google Maps, this is not an entrance” at the trailhead.

• Ian 16:10 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Waze updates baased on user inputs, Google maps doesn’t. Given the random closures brought on by construction sites in this city, I find Google maps pretty much useless a lot of the time.

• vasi 17:11 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  When heading to the airport, I’ve learned to ask for “Departures” rather than things like “Air Canada” or “YUL”. Somehow that always seems to send me to the right place, rather than some ridiculous route

• CE 19:16 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Whatever Uber drivers use for their GPS often sends them up alleys for some reason. Do the drivers have to follow the routes exactly as their GPS tells them? I can imagine them risking being accused of taking a passenger for a ride if they don’t.

  I remember hearing a story on CBC radio about how a large portion of the human brain is dedicated to navigation. Relying on GPS to navigate is causing us to use much less of that brain capacity and it can start to atrophy. I’ve heard that taxi drivers and others who have to navigate space a lot have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s. I stopped using GPS when driving after I realized that I had no idea how to get Joilette after driving there about eight times for work. Now I use a map and figure out my routes in advance and put it on a sticky note on the dashboard. Since I’ve put the map in my head already, I find I don’t even really need it. The strange thing is that despite GPS navigation only being mainstream for maybe a decade in a half, people think it’s completely insane that I travel without it. I’ve had people actually get mad at me about it and challenge me on my ability to get somewhere. It’s weird. I also find people now have a very low tolerance for getting lost, if I miss an exit or am not 100% sure about where I am or where I need to turn off, it seems to cause some people a lot of anxiety. I know one person who lives in Laval and she uses her GPS to get to the grocery store that she goes to a couple times a week. She said that she doesn’t know how to get there without it.

• MarcG 20:29 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  Exactly. Now do that with every single problem that life throws at us and we’re in for a good time. Whatever part of our brains Covid doesn’t eat AI is primed to finish off.

• Ian 21:48 on 2026-02-17 Permalink

  That’s one way to look at it, but another is that having alternate routes proposed actually forces you to consider the validity between routes based on your won knowledge – so to be more actively engaged in your assisted direction-finding, and be more adaptable. For instance, I can get up past the decarie interchange and on my way top the west island in a couple of specific ways that most people don’t even consider, which I know because I car pool as a driver.

  That’s jsut everyday stuff. When I’m going somewhere I’ve never been before, jsut looking at a paper map doesn’t tell me much except where the official roads are.

  In any case, assisted maps aren’t the same as using chatgpt (lol) and hey, lots of people used to think maps were for chumps (like my grandpa who constantly got lost)

• MarcG 09:09 on 2026-02-18 Permalink

  Using assistive tech mindfully buffers against its lobe-melting capacity but that’s not how the majority are engaging with it. (In case it’s not obvious, I’m not saying I’m immune to this, see my experience at Témiscouata above). Another non-map anecdote: My wife teaches a language and many people assume that you can put words into Google translate or ChatGPT and copy/paste whatever it barfs out, then when corrected have a very hard time accepting that it isn’t that easy.

• CE 09:34 on 2026-02-18 Permalink

  I’m not against the tech, I use Google Maps all the time and think it’s a pretty good product (especially Street View). I use it to map out routes and it can figure out some good ones that I hadn’t considered before (I live on a street that is specifically designed to be difficult to access and just this week discovered a much more convenient route to access it from a taxi’s GPS). What I don’t want to do is have to blindly rely on it for all my navigation. I don’t think it’s healthy and it really cripples you if the tech is not available for some reason.

  One other thing that we’ve lost because of this technology is asking people on the street for directions. It very rarely happens anymore and is almost always older people. When asking an actual resident, you’re possibly going to get a much more interesting and human response than what Google’s algorithm can provide. It was also a way to interact with locals while in a new place. I know it’s not a big deal but feels like one of a thousand cuts to human interaction.

  @MarcG, I’ve had that same issue around ChatGPT, some people just can’t accept that it might have given them incorrect information. There are people who seem to think it’s some kind of all-knowing oracle.

• Joey 15:18 on 2026-02-18 Permalink

  Waze is very useful for routes you take often because it updates traffic data in real-time (given that so many drivers use it, the data is pretty good). Sure, I know the four basic ways to get to the airport from my house and I have my preferred route (which isn’t always the quickest – routing apps IMO overemphasize ‘shortest arrival’ at the expense of ‘most pleasant ride,’ ‘fewest annoying/dangerous stretches’ and ‘shortest distance’), but only Waza knows which route is going to be ideal at this particular moment.

  @Ian at one point the city made a big deal of sharing construction data so that routing apps could incorporate closure and detour info but I suspect that fell apart (hard to believe even the city knows what’s going on anymore).

  @CE I was taking an uber from the Bell Centre to Mile End last summer around 10:30PM. Uber had the driver go up MacTavish to Pine and then up Parc. Except it didn’t know that the McTavish/Pine intersection was closed due to an Alouettes game. The driver and I came up with a game plan (head west and go over Remembrance/Camillien-Houde), but when he started in that direction the Uber routing kicked in and decided he should go down Peel and take Sherbrooke east to Parc – according to Waze, that would’ve been about 15 minutes longer than going over the mountain, probably even longer since lots of traffic was being dumped into downtown due to the closure. The driver agreed to stick with our plan, which wound up being fairly quick, but explained that he might get dinged by Uber for abandoning the route. I was just grateful that the guy knew what I meant by ‘go over the mountain’ and didn’t refuse…

• JP 00:10 on 2026-02-19 Permalink

  Just came across this story and while it’s not about Montreal, it seems pertinent to this discussion thread.

  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/nyregion/peace-bridge-immigration.html

  “Part of the reason for drivers’ errors seems to be their reliance on mapping apps, which have occasionally sent unaware motorists across the bridge. It was a phenomenon that The Times experienced last year, when a request for directions to a restaurant in Buffalo resulted in a trip across the international border. The Times’s journalists were told by a Canadian border agent that these inadvertent crossings happen “at least 20 times a day.”