Original toot in Spanish says: “OK, so I need some alternatives to Google Maps, because I just decided seconds ago to stop using it after I got proposed a trip with a completely unnecessary detour which adds two extra minutes just because it pass by a gas station that sponsors this trip.”
I’ve noticed Waze (owned by Google) sometimes suggests a route I don’t feel like (eg I’m on the highway and not in a rush so I don’t feel like taking an exit Waze suggests), but when I ignore it and it recalculates, the estimated time goes down.
On the one hand, I know that it has to explore the alternative routes from time to time to know which ones are fastest and that if it’s directing a sufficient portion of the overall flow, it has to use multiple routes or else any single route it suggests will become bogged down with too much traffic, but I gotta wonder if there’s other motivations, especially when it’s a highway exit.
Does waze have a fuel saving mode? It might be sending you down an exit because the route uses less fuel. I doubt waze and google maps has enough users to cause too much traffic. Surely most people drive familiar routes. I could be wrong.
The map apps will give you strange routes sometimes because if everyone obeys those strange routes, it actually improves traffic for everyone.
Steve Mould explains it here https://youtu.be/Cg73j3QYRJc?si=qYCSU5iEZK-g2lE4
At 3:06 the paradox mentioned (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox) talks about how you can improve traffic by making people avoid taking an obvious route and instead have them take an apparently non-optimal route, but which will actually improve traffic for everyone.