This has happened a few times: I’ll be a little turned around and double-check with Google Maps on the iPhone to see the best way to get myself back to civilization. Google Maps will spit out a completely weird and convoluted way to get there. In fact, a couple of times, it’s told me to go quite the distance in the OTHER direction, pull a U-Turn, and then head where I’m going. Like in the screenshot below:

As you can see, Google Maps wants me to hop on the freeway, go down a few miles, get off at Zeeb and turn around and get right back on the freeway and then! only then! head into the direction I’m actually trying to go into. I’m sitting there in the parking lot, scratching my head because as far as I can tell there’s no reason I can’t just … turn left out of the parking lot and do that instead.

The only explanation I have is that Google has installed wormholes all over the world*, and if ONLY I would trust them FOR JUST A MINUTE and give them the BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT and go into that direction, I’d see that there’s a convenient little wormhole that spits me out within a matter of seconds. Alas, that’s not enough to get me to brave I-94 at rush hour.

Google Maps is also utterly and completely useless in situations such as this:

I was in Boston, incredibly soggy, incredibly late getting back from lunch, incredibly lost, and this is the closest they could get to “current location”. I must’ve walked around in circles for an hour.

So how is Google Maps supposed to fix this? Here are some quick ideas off the top of my head.

1. Allow users to contribute their own suggested routes or corrections.

2. Incorporate the “suggested routes” feature onto the iPhone version, stat!

3. Enable users to orient themselves, such as with an arrow pointing into the direction they need to head into, or an auto-rotating map.

4. On that note, enable Google Maps to orient itself, so that it can factor in whether turning left is going to be an issue when it gives directions.

5. The street view feature is a good way to deal with situations such as a huge, gnarly intersections, but it’s so difficult to activate on the iPhone that I’ve only ever used it by accident. Fix that.

6. Cache maps (zoomed in several levels as well as a few miles surrounding) so they still work in the rain, as the iPhone 3G signal tends to drop during storms. Did I mention I got soggy in Boston?

*wormholes that are written in Python, of course. As for the loop on the map, well, someone must’ve overlooked a whitespace somewhere.