MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.
The “OG of online mapping,” as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest’s mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.
MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States.
I think everyone who is of a certain age has one of those “I tried shortest distance on the GPS” stories. Mine is driving to my brother’s apartment in San Francisco. I generally knew the way, but there was a road closure that detoured me to an unfamiliar street, so I pulled out my phone and put in his address, and it gave me the option of shortest time or shortest distance.
Figuring it was probably about the same regardless of which one I picked, I selected shortest distance.
The resulting 30 minute detour took me on some of the hilliest residential neighborhoods in the city. I was navigating these nearly 30 degree inclines in my poor 4 cylinder Toyota Previa. That was a lesson I only had to learn once. Shortest is not faster and will not necessarily save you any gas and you may go on an adventure you didn’t intend.
Nowadays I don’t even see the option, it always defaults to shortest time accounting for traffic and such, although I assume it’s probably buried somewhere in the settings menu.
Now that you mention it, I have family in the Bay Area and had an incident with them too!
I was visiting and had a small econobox rental (I forget the exact model). I said hey, we should take this thing up to someplace with a lot of giant redwoods. I’ve never seen huge trees! And so I looked around on the map and saw a Big Basin Redwoods State Park that sounded promising.
The first leg turned out just great. But after touring the park, it was still early afternoon and I thought maybe we can go to Santa Cruz and have dinner before swinging back? The GPS at that point said I basically needed to backtrack down the same road for a ways, but that sounded boring. I was a tourist. I wanted to see new sights! So I had it choose an alternate route down China Grade Road. I still remember that name. Omg. It was a logging road with aggressive dips and switchbacks with huge drops if you missed one.
As a bit of a epilogue, a couple of years later, I was reading “The Never Game” by Jeffery Deaver, and at one point, the protagonist is hunting for someone at Big Basin. After not finding them, he decides to check along a nearby logging road. Hey I’ve been there man! Don’t do it!!