How do maps apps (Waze, Google maps, etc) actually calculate best routes and time for distance travelled? Is it all from tracking?
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They will already have static information like the speed limits of different roads, pre-planned road closures, and the usual traffic conditions at different times, and can use that to provisionally tell you what is probably the best route between any given A and B. That’s what you’ll get if you look a route up in advance.
But when planning an immediate route, they will also be tracking the live progress of other users who are ahead of you on those routes, and add that to their static intelligence, to produce an estimate of what route would be best for you right now.
Of course, they can be wrong. Once google sent me into “5 minute congestion”. The road had actually just been closed 5 minutes earlier, and I was there for 2 hours in the end. But because the road had only just been closed, all Google saw was that other users had been slowed down by 5 minutes. Users can also submit reports, but otherwise, Google doesn’t (yet) have the technology to detect exactly what’s going on (eg traffic stopped, police cars on site) and tell you to get the hell out of there accordingly.
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