What is it missing you ask?  Local knowledge, and real time route mapping changes aka; the detour.

I work for the Washington State Department of Transportation and often we have to close roads for construction.   We put out the message of these closures through every avenue we can, however the one missing tool that we don’t have access to is the in car mapping or navigation systems.

Over the course of the last couple of years the agency has been working on constructing a new Hood Canal bridge.   During this construction, the bridge had a six week closure in June of 2009.  This closure was put into every media channel we had an outlet to.  Posted on Web sites, blogs, TV stations and we even publicly challenged Google, Mapquest and Bing to change their driving directions during the closure through Twitter (only Mapquest responded and made the change on their navigation and driving directions map, kudos to their team).

One of the audiences we found that was most difficult to reach during this closure were those who got into a rental car or RV with a gps navigation system and tried to get across the bridge.   This six week closure was not included in those navigation systems.  Because of the directions provided by the navigation systems we had to literally turn away hundreds of people and let them know they needed to take the nearly two hour long detour around the closure.

Can you imagine the look on their faces and the frustration they must have felt to be told they were given bad information?  More often than not our staff was on the receiving end of that frustration.

I will admit this is a considerable challenge for companies trying to map the world. However, we have the data these companies need, but many state and local transportation organizations don’t…yet.   Mapquest right now is the only company that has taken the the time to try to contact the state DOT’s and has offered a way for them to provide the local closure information so that their customers have the most accurate information when using their navigation and direction tools.

While Google is opening the doors to free directions and navigation, until they work with local agencies to enable real-time routing based on construction closures frustration will still abound.