just drive

There's a word that comes to mind when navigation gets so complicated that it becomes ridiculous...

...and that word is convoluted.

Since I'm a navigation nerd, I do sometimes read user reviews of both Garmin navigators like the DriveSmart 66 and popular navigation smartphone apps like Google Maps and Waze. Call it a guilty pleasure, but I do get a laugh reading about the absolutely unreasonable and totally ridiculous feature requests users make.

One of the top complaints has always been routing, which is something that's been going on even before smartphone navigation even existed. Back in the early 2010s when a Garmin nuvi 50LM was what most people used for GPS navigation (or a nuvi 3590 if you were a fancy-pants), oh yeah, people yapped about the routing.

Was the routing bad back then? No. What happened is that if the navigation device didn't calculate a route exactly the way the user wanted, TO THE USER REVIEWS he or she went to give it a 1-star rating.

On the Garmin side of things, there is and has been a way for years to set up routes absolutely exactly the way you want with extremely fine detail, and that's making a route using Garmin BaseCamp software.

You thought you could get ridiculously detailed with routing using Google Maps? You can get even more ridiculous with BaseCamp.

If I wanted to, I could put together a ridiculously long 1,000+ mile route avoiding every tollway, every roundabout, every highway and interstate, every U-turn, use nothing but residential roads, and use no roads exceeding 45mph.

Yeah, I can do that, but won't, because that's convoluted.

Here's an example of something that turned convoluted on me:

There's a specific place I go to once every few months where along the way there's a particularly nasty intersection that always gets jammed up with traffic. Figuring I'd be smart and craft a route around that intersection, I sat down at my computer and created one. Every road seemed to check out, and I was certain the route I made would not only go around that nasty intersection, but also get me to where I wanted to go quicker.

The day comes that I have to drive to that place, I'm ready with my custom route, and off I go. Things are going great, then I get to the part where I go around the intersection, go up a few side roads, and...

...there's an elementary school that I didn't notice when I made my route. And I happened to be going through there exactly at the time school was letting out. Parents in cars everywhere, crossing guards stopping cars, and all the rest of the standard stuff that happens when a school lets out. Traffic is crawling, and there's not a thing I can do except deal with it.

Not only did I not save any time at all, but wasted more time crawling through there at 10 to 15mph along with stops until I finally passed the school. I would have been better off just dealing with that other intersection that gets jacked up with cars.

This isn't to say that creating custom routes is worthless, but it doesn't account for several things, including but not limited to:

• A town deciding to close off Main Street for a parade that you had no idea was going to happen.
• A landscaper's truck blocking an alley that can happen any time during daylight hours.
• A long gravel truck driving exactly where he's not supposed to be and manages to block lanes on both sides of the road where everybody has to wait for 5 to 10 minutes so he can straighten out without hitting a utility pole.
• Road construction that was not reported in advance by anybody and doesn't show up in your navigation system either.
• Random hyper-local weather events like flash flooding, a tree being knocked down, or even something as simple as wind gusts that blow trash/recycle bins directly in the middle of the road.

You get the idea.

How do you accommodate for it all? You don't, because that's impossible. Regardless of how good you are with crafting a custom route, you'll never be able to account for it all.

Intuition is the solution

Custom routes in my experience do not save time because it lacks something. No matter how good technology gets, it doesn't have intuition. Technology thinks rationally, but a lot of human intuition, i.e. a gut feeling, is irrational.

Developing a good intuition requires knowing the map and taking risks.

What kind of risks? I'll give a small example.

There's a town I sometimes drive through where more or less everything there is on Main Street. As such, this street does get clogged up with cars often. And it's one of those towns where it's easy to get in but difficult to get out.

I was in that town to get some stuff done, did so, and when I started to drive out I saw that Main Street was all clogged up as usual. This is when I tapped the Garmin DriveSmart screen to get a 2D map view, like a paper map. I was driving east, and saw a little side street heading south that appeared to connect with a larger boulevard that also headed east. I took it.

Would that side street actually connect to that boulevard or lead me to a dead end? I had no idea, but turned on to it anyway. It was a risk I was willing to take. Fortunately, that street did connect to that boulevard, and I was able to skip all the Main Street traffic entirely.

No navigation system, be it Garmin or phone app, would have tried that. Doing what I did was an irrational go-by-the-gut maneuver that the computer simply will not do.

Sometimes taking risks like that works, sometimes not.

Crafting convoluted custom routes doesn't work to save time, but a good sense of what's around you along with some reasonable risk taking does.

In other words, I just drive and figure things out.

Those seeking a navigation system that always gets routes correct every time is in for some serious disappointment, because that doesn't exist. This was true years ago, it's still true now, and I doubt that will ever change.

Published 2025 Aug 14