02 In detail
The same journey, two answers
Both apps were given the same start and the same destination. Google Maps found the best route for a car: 20 minutes over 4.4 miles. Blue Light Maps, in emergency mode, found 6 minutes over 1.8 miles.
Google Maps hasn’t got anything wrong here. It answered the question it was built to answer, which is how a member of the public should drive there. A response vehicle on blue lights is asking a different question.
What Google Maps does well
Credit where it’s due. Google Maps has the most complete picture of places anywhere: businesses, opening hours, reviews, Street View, public transport and walking routes. Its live traffic picture is excellent. It’s free, everyone already knows how to use it, and it’s on almost every phone a crew member carries.
Why Google Maps isn’t built for emergency response
It has no emergency mode. Google Maps routes every car by the same rules. It won’t send a response car through a bus gate, down a bus lane or via an emergency access point, and it treats a no-right-turn as absolute. Those exemptions are often the fastest way to scene, and they’re the ones your drivers are trained to use.
Its speeds come from ordinary traffic. Google says it predicts traffic and ETAs from aggregate location data, historical traffic patterns and live conditions. In other words, from how everyone else drives. That’s the right answer for a commuter. A vehicle on blue lights moves differently: it gets through traffic that a car would sit in, and it loses time on tight turns and narrow streets where traffic has nowhere to pull over. Blue Light Maps learns road speeds from anonymised telematics of emergency vehicles that have driven those roads on blue lights. That makes ETAs reflect how a response vehicle actually travels, and it steers routes towards roads that suit response driving: wider, with fewer turns.
It doesn’t know what you’re driving. The consumer app has no setting for height, width or weight. Google does offer large-vehicle routing to developers through its Maps Platform. Its documentation lists coverage for the contiguous United States and Japan only. A fire appliance or a police carrier gets a car’s route.
Offline is a fallback, not a mode. Google Maps can navigate offline inside an area you’ve downloaded. Its own help pages say you get no traffic information or alternative routes while offline, the whole route has to fit inside the downloaded area, and areas need refreshing before they expire. Blue Light Maps keeps the map and the route calculation on the device by design, so losing signal on the way to a rural job changes nothing.
It’s a personal app. There’s no way to set a routing policy across a fleet, push an incident from CAD, or give a crew shared ETAs and operational layers. Each phone is configured, or not, by whoever is holding it.
How much time emergency routing saves
Driving to scene takes up the largest share of a response, and it’s the stage that conventional navigation leaves untouched. In one police force area, routing that uses exemptions saved over a minute on average per emergency response. Individual jobs vary much more than that. You can read how Blue Light Routing works and what it takes into account.
Moving from Google Maps
Blue Light Maps installs from the App Store and Google Play, and provides frontline staff with a modern & familiar interface. Services deploy it through MDM with vehicle profiles and routing policy already set, so crews open it and drive.