Speculation, but probably their legal department feels like that'd be a sort of implied warranty, and if the route wasn't appreciably safer (what does that even mean? Surely reasonable people/people with a different set of strengths & weaknesses will differ), they might open themselves up to lawsuits?

Possibly a similar situation if they claim they can tell one route is safer than another, but then don't give you the safer option?

Also the "least stressful route"

They have started suggesting routes with fewer turns.

which i like, but "least stressful" for me would be avoiding busy intersections, or road construction, areas with lots of accidents, crime-ridden areas.

I frequently take more complicated back roads to avoid areas like the above.

When the total distance traveled for the shortest vs fastest option is very high, Google always shows both the options (or at least, some versions of them).

I think safest route is hard to define, especially given that the data is not dense and may not be relevant (e.g., an intersection had a lot of historical accidents so its technically unsafe based on data but it has been rebuilt recently and there has been no accident since so its currently safe).

Don't forget "most fun route" which is probably contrary to #3.

I badly need a "tour" mode

Interesting, as a bike commuter, it's something I gradually did manually. And it never occurred to me that they could compute it.

4. Safest route + don’t send me through a bad part of town

> don’t send me through a bad part of town

Microsoft's attempt was branded as racist[0]. I don't think any of these companies are likely to touch this feature in the US. I did see an article about Waze doing this in Brazil in 2016, but not sure if that's still happening.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-f...

This is why we can’t have nice things.