In the back of my mind, I wondered for years if it's possible to improve navigation directions vs what I see in Google Maps.

The walking case

When I look at city walking directions, the first thing I attempt to do is optimise the road crossings.  I do this by picking the sides of the road with the fewest interruptions, and by doing corner to corner crossings at a single junction to avoid wasting time waiting for lights to change.

If the weather is hot, and it's midday, you might want to walk on the southern pavements on an east west road to avoid the sun as much as possible.

This could be automated

The driving case

Some junctions are awful when the sun is low, an intelligent system could avoid this dependent on the time of day.  Waze has a feature to avoid difficult junctions, but I don't think it accounts for weather.

Implementing it

I had a go at using Google Gemini to create this for me, but it couldn't even make it run without crashing. This might be a Friday night project one day over winter.