This Google Maps ‘safety’ feature is actually making roads more dangerous

Picture this: You’re driving on a crowded highway, preparing to change lanes and pass a tractor-trailer. As you check your mirrors, a loud chime on your car’s infotainment screen rings out.

It’s Google Maps, asking whether a stalled car is still on the shoulder, as other drivers have reported. A prompt appears—Yes or No—requiring a response within seconds. Your already taxed brain now has another decision to process, all while you’re moving at 60 miles per hour.

Scenarios like this became possible last summer, when Google overhauled its popular navigation app. Since then, drivers using Google Maps frequently receive prompts to confirm an “incident,” such as a police vehicle or stalled car, that other users have flagged. These prompts are announced with a chime as well as text and a timer that consume the bottom chunk of the app display. If there is a way to turn off this incident verification feature, I haven’t found it. (A Google spokesperson did not respond when I asked.)

These prompts can be annoying to drivers who find them intrusive. More troublingly, experts in UX and human factors worry that they will cause distraction that leads to crashes.

“If the request happens on a stretch of road where there isn’t that much one going around you, it’s probably not a problem,” said Birsen Donmez, a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Toronto who researches distracted driving. “But if it pops up when you know your turn is coming up and you really need to focus, it could confuse you and divert your attention.”

That’s an unsettling problem for the hundreds of millions of people who use Google Maps, as well as for everyone who shares the road with them.

‘This is an irrelevant piece of information’

Google has dominated navigation since launching Maps in February 2005. Though competitors have appeared—Apple, MapQuest, and TomTom GO among them—none has come close to matching Google’s user base. In 2013, Google solidified its lead by acquiring the Israeli startup Waze, whose crowdsourced traffic and incident reporting technology later shaped key features of Maps even though it remained a separate app.

Today, Google Maps guides far more journeys than other wayfinding tools. According to a 2024 MarketWatch analysis, 70% of U.S. drivers used Google Maps, compared to just 25% for both Waze and Apple Maps. MapQuest, once ubiquitous, is no longer a market leader but still had 17 million regular users as of 2022.

But for the first time in years, Google Maps now faces a credible threat. Fully recovered from an inauspicious 2012 launch, Apple Maps is now a vastly improved service that has garnered praise for design elements like object-based instructions (“Turn left after the next traffic light”) that can seem more intuitive than Google Maps’ directions (“In 500 feet, turn left”). Meanwhile, the iPhone—which features Apple Maps as its default—has been grabbing market share from Android.

With competition with Apple Maps intensifying, Google unveiled major revisions to its mapping tool last summer. Google Maps had already invited users to submit information about observed traffic incidents, which the company would then share with other drivers. Now, with its new update, the company announced, “other drivers can confirm the incident with just a tap.”

What that means in practice is that drivers frequently hear a chime as a question appears on their infotainment screen, such as “Stalled vehicle reported 51 minutes ago from Google Maps drivers. Is this still there?” A countdown progress bar pushes drivers to quickly tap a Yes or No button. “It makes you feel like you have to respond or get it off of your screen,” said Kate Moran, vice president for research and content at Nielsen Norman Group, a UX advisory practice.

After a few seconds the prompt disappears, either because the driver answered the question or because the timer hit zero.

Innocuous though it may seem, demanding “just a tap” can be dangerously distracting, University of Toronto’s Donmez said, because infotainment touchscreens inevitably require users to look away from the roadway ahead. She added that inexperienced or elderly drivers are more likely to struggle “to suppress irrelevant stimulus.”

Donmez is particularly concerned by the urgency of Google Maps’ requests for confirmation. “Drivers typically modulate their distraction engagement based on what’s coming up on the road, and that’s why crashes don’t happen,” she said. For instance, many drivers instinctively wait until after completing a lane change before they select a new podcast or adjust the air conditioning. But Google Maps’s chime and countdown progress bar are designed to demand immediate attention, regardless of road conditions.

Defenders of Google Maps’s new UX might note that Waze, the other navigation app owned by Alphabet, has long asked users to confirm past reports of traffic incidents. But that doesn’t mean Waze’s design is safe. In a 2019 paper, a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers noted that Waze is “dangerous to not only the driver but also to nearby drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists.”

When I asked how Google Maps evaluated the safety of its UX update before rolling it out, a corporate spokesperson replied in an email, “We take safety very seriously and regularly test our features for driver distraction.”

According to a corporate blog post, Google Maps’s new UX has been distributed “globally.” The company does not appear to have offered users an option to turn off the verification prompts or limit them to specific types of incidents. One user asked on the Google Maps Community forum how to disable the “’still there?’ questions while driving,” but that query went unanswered.

Notably, many of the incidents flagged by Google Maps are unrelated to traffic safety, such as vehicles on the shoulder that passing drivers often encounter without second thought. “Most of the time this is an irrelevant piece of information for safety,” Donmez said.

Given their potential for annoyance as well as distraction, these prompts shouldn’t be inescapable, she said. “Some drivers may find the feature useful,” she said, “but they should have the ability to easily override it.”

Moran agreed. “It’s not that the intention behind the feature is bad, but the way it’s been implemented is the problem,” she told me. “A good experience would be allowing people to say, ‘Don’t prompt me with these dialogues anymore.’ But even better would be to require people to opt in. Instead of turning it on by default, allow people who might be more excited about being in the Google community to say ‘yes, I’ll answer these questions and proactively provide data.’”

Instead, all Google Maps users are now being peppered with verification requests, whether they like it or not.

‘It could just be a lack of foresight’

As to why Google Maps changed its UX to request user confirmations, Moran suggests the company probably wants to build a more current dataset of road conditions. “If you really want to know if something is still on the road, the fastest way to get that information is to ask the person driving by,” she said.

But there is another possibility: The prompts’ unavoidable and aggressive design may be the brainchild of project managers instructed to increase user engagement by any means necessary.

“People who make UX product decisions are often under lots of pressure to achieve short-sighted, short-term metrics,” Moran said. “It could just be a lack of foresight that this was going to be distracting or annoying.” (Google Maps did not respond to questions about its reasons for demanding that all users confirm road conditions).

For now, at least, Google Maps users are stuck with its new UX. It is too soon to know whether the design will increase crashes, but the threat is real, particularly given the app’s huge user base. Road safety advocates have already expressed concern about distraction due to increasingly complex infotainment systems, as automakers strive to offer the flashiest designs (even though many car owners find touchscreens woefully inferior to the knobs and dials they replaced). In a 2022 study, researchers at Drexel University concluded that the comparatively simple infotainment systems of the early 2010s were already a statistically significant risk factor for crashes.

Yet, infotainment systems remain unregulated in the U.S. In 2012, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued voluntary guidance proposing maximum thresholds for the time drivers must look away from the road to accomplish an infotainment task, but within a few years automakers were routinely violating it. They have paid no penalty for doing so.

With the Trump administration reflexively hostile to regulations, new federal safeguards pertaining to navigation tools or infotainment systems are unlikely. Still, Moran thinks that lawsuits involving crashes caused by distracted driving might force Google Maps to change course. “The first time I noticed this new feature, I thought ‘Wow, I’m surprised their legal team is okay with this,’” she said.

Alternatively, the market’s invisible hand might render its own verdict about Google’s UX design: Its users can always switch to Apple.