So I’ve noticed that Google maps always adds walking time into public transport routes, but never accounts for parking and walking when driving.
I like it feel like this gives the impression that public transport is slower, when 9/10 driving with friends we waste a ton of time parking and walking.
If Google maps and Waze showed parking and walking estimates, it would level the playing field and possibly have a dramatic effect on public transport usage.
It absolutely is not a trivial thing to calculate, I expect. Until someone figures out how to use fluid dynamics to do it. But what I’m saying is that parking is similarly a non trivial problem, imo. But maybe they could start with like a heat map of targeted area, and then once that area has been reached, how much longer you hover around said target. And how far you end up stopping the car. Hmm… Yeah okay, maybe it’s not that hard and they’re just lazy bums I dunno.
That’s the thing : estimating traffic time is just as hard if not harder than parking. There’s no excuse for not providing a bracket to give people guesses for that, just like traffic delays.
Also the thing about fluid dynamics is that the flow characteristics change dramatically below and above the Reynolds coefficient, and that just shifts the issue : heavily trafficked roads tend to hover really close to it and being wrong by just a few cars or wrongly estimating their agressivity (yeah that changes things significantly) can completely throw off the calculations.