Definitely the most detailed analysis about map readability and features selection over time and in different areas.We might disagree on some points but his work is truly amazing and always interesting.I agree with you over his previous blog and about his position at Apple Maps, great to see him doing what he does best.

It is ridiculously brilliantly detailed. I love the obsessiveness the has gone on to figure out the Google Maps changes.It&#x27;s wonderfully written too, easy to follow through his logic without having to re-read sections.

My first thought reading the post was &quot;Is this a book?&quot; It might as well be.

I think he left Apple over a year and a half ago. But yeah, his observations about Apple Maps are particularly well informed. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tested.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;573368-brief-comparing-digital-cartography-apple-and-google-maps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tested.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;573368-brief-comparing-digital-ca...</a>

&gt; he went to work at Apple Maps??? He writes a lot of this article like he&#x27;s trying to guess from press and outside observation what Apple is doing &#x2F; planning. If he was JUST working there, wouldn&#x27;t he know all this? Should his &#x27;outside observations&#x27; be considered to be him fitting outside information to what he already knows?

It sure is nice having Justin O&#x27;Bierne writing publically about maps again. His old 41Latitude blog was phenomenal and then got blackholed when he went to work at Apple Maps. Then he left Apple and is back in the free world and doing phenomenal analysis of digital mapping like this article. I can&#x27;t wait for him to finish his book.

It&#x27;s mentioned at the end of this blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.googleblog.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;11&#x2F;1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.googleblog.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;11&#x2F;1080p-hd-comes-to-you...</a>

I can&#x27;t find anything about this re-encode - do you have a link to read about it?

I&#x27;m not overly surprised that Google have added so many buildings in such a short time... This IS the same company that re-encoded the whole YouTube corpus (which while small at the time was still a considerable about of content) in a weekend to improve the user experience (SD -&gt; HD launch).

This is why efforts based on exhaustive mapping make me nervous. Things change, sometimes rapidly. The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of ground truth.

Good point, the map is not the territory and the cars are engaging with the territory.Another interesting thing to consider, should there be widespread use of autonomous vehicles is the absolutely massive deployment of digital sensors that would entail, and who would use this data and to what ends? It would basically be realtime Streetview.

Up to a point. At that point an autonomous system needs to be able to interpret and react to the physical world as it actually is at the moment as opposed to how it&#x27;s supposed to be.

Yes !Each time justin writes a blog post, I feel like a cartographer for a couple of minutes.I love the attention he puts to the evolution of mapping services.The only better thing would be the same blog as a post mortem from Google where they discuss the reasoning, design and tech behind these changes.

What an incredible post. I just love this guys blog, I wonder how long it took to research all of this.As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the self driving car race in pole position.

GM saved us from missing a wedding using an near obsolete razr i over 3G while the in-car GPS was directing us into oblivion.Not only GM was generally right, the overal intertial refresh rate was smooth .. extremely surprising.

For me the problem with Google Maps is how appallingly badly it fails when things go wrong.  The offline mode is prone to silently getting locked in &quot;rerouting&quot; and just completely leaving me hanging for 10 minutes at a time.  And if it loses gps signal, it doesn&#x27;t seem to think the driver needs to know about this.  A
Silent failure is terrible.

That&#x27;s what Apple Maps does (but only for the very last announcement):&quot;Your destination is on the right, 123 Main Street.&quot;

I usually hear &quot;your destination is on the right&quot;, and become aware to having zoomed by the place. 5 minutes of U-turning ensues.

This is all true, but of course there will always be a few missing features that seem so obvious and useful that you wonder why they still don&#x27;t have them.For me it&#x27;s one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the end of the drive. If it&#x27;s not an address I&#x27;m familiar with and not a business with a sign out front, by the time I get there I&#x27;ve usually forgotten the street number!But when I arrive all I hear is &quot;your destination is on the right.&quot;It would be so great if the last two announcements were:&quot;Your destination, 123 Main Street, will be on the right in 800 feet.&quot;&quot;Your destination, 123 Main Street, is on the right.&quot;

My best experience with google maps was actually finding a restaurant inside of Kyoto or Tokyo mainstation. Google maps navigated me perfectly across all floors and knew all stairs I had to take.

Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly, like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering, a planned building, et cetera.Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front without extra time needed for travel is truly magic.

I launched Google Maps for mobile in 2005.  In 2006, Eric Schmidt was worried that Yahoo Go was a killer app.  My claim that Google Maps was the real killer app fell on deaf ears. :)

It was pretty mindblowing when it came out, and was the first instance I recall encountering meaningful usage of AJAX.

Why not? How do you define &quot;killer app&quot;? Maps is one of my very highest used apps, alongside chat&#x2F;text&#x2F;email. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s more revolutionary than all of those, because chat&#x2F;text&#x2F;email were just mobile versions of apps perfected on desktop, but a mobile map app shows you exactly where you are, which changes everything. I&#x27;ve traveled internationally both in the pre- and post- smartphone era, and let me tell you, travel is way easier now.

Even more impressive, when in satellite view hold control, click and drag upwards.

It really is something. If you&#x27;ve never seen it, switch to satellite and start scrolling out. That&#x27;s realtime cloud information that appears and as you keep going you get realtime night&#x2F;day location rendering (complete with artificial lighting) and then realtime locations for all the major bodies in our solar system (which you can then hop over too and take a look at) (Edit: Ok, maybe this isn&#x27;t locations of the bodies but you can still hop over to them and look around. The earth&#x2F;sun location seems right though). Everyone I show this to has never seen it but the Google engineers that work on this stuff clearly care about what they are putting out.

I stopped using Google Maps on the desktop a while back because it would kill a octo-core AMD system with 12GB of RAM in Chrome. Bing Maps might not be better as a map, but the best map is the one that loads and lets you scroll, right?I switch to Apple Maps on mobile when Google stopped letting me search for directions without signing in.Incredible piece of technology, destroyed by real bad product decisions.

Well said. It kills an old Core2 laptop I have. Literally crashes Linux.My fault of course for using that laptop, but sometimes I forget because it basically works for most other things.

I wouldn&#x27;t even know my own neighbourhood as well as I do without Google maps. One of, if not the single most impressive digital feats freely available to all on the internet.

I remember when Google maps first came out in like 2005 or so. It was a truely revolutionary app.Not just for being one of the first apps to be properly dynamic and AJAX based, but also because it was possibly the first time that we had access to an entire world of satellite maps online, something previously reserved for large corporations and governments.

Can&#x27;t live without it. I travel a lot.Lately I have even been wanting an operating system that has maps as the main UI, or a majorly core feature. With the amount that I use maps, it is an absolute pain to have to switch to it all the time.I pin every place recommendation I find in my social circles online and tag them with who suggested them. When I&#x27;m driving I&#x27;d like to pin&#x2F;note places I see without interacting with the phone. When I&#x27;m flying I wan&#x27;t to know what specific features I am seeing from the air (towns, mountains, lakes). When I&#x27;m on a road trip I want to hear snippets of info about the small towns that I&#x27;m passing through or the things I see out the window. When I&#x27;m walking I want to use the camera for input and output to the map to pin and locate myself. When I&#x27;m indoors I don&#x27;t want to feel lost again or ask where the restroom is.Location has become a core part of my interaction with the world but it still feels rather basic as a 3rd party app on my phone. Or another tab on my desktop.

Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer app.

FWIW, Samsung is the corporate booster behind Mapzen, which provides free mapping APIs while contributing to OpenStreetMap:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trademarks.justia.com&#x2F;860&#x2F;91&#x2F;mapzen-86091461.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trademarks.justia.com&#x2F;860&#x2F;91&#x2F;mapzen-86091461.html</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapzen.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapzen.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>&gt; Mapzen is an open and accessible mapping platform...Based out of the Samsung Accelerator, we support the geo community through building tools and collaborating on open source mapping projects. We believe that a healthy mapping ecosystem is one that is diverse, sustainable, and accessible to all.

Isn&#x27;t open street maps exactly that? I guess the shame is that big corporations don&#x27;t all contribute to that rather than try to compete? It is a thought provoking idea but I struggle to see which side I prefer. I think competition is one of the things that drives innovation.

I think I understand what you mean but I think that is actually the proper functioning of capitalism not a failure. If Apple&#x2F;TomTom&#x2F;etc. didn’t create maps, Google wouldn’t invest resources in making theirs better.

As the article shows, there&#x27;s always some subjectivity in mapping. It is essential that there be competition and different approaches to that enormous task.

You can say that about every single instance of competition. Yet when governments run things they don&#x27;t generally do as good a job...

Agreed! That&#x27;s a big reason why I&#x27;ve enjoyed working with colleagues on a fully &quot;open&quot; approach to mapping software and data at Mapzen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapzen.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;our-magna-carto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapzen.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;our-magna-carto&#x2F;</a>We&#x27;ve made much use of:- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openaddresses.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openaddresses.io&#x2F;</a>And founded efforts like:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transit.land" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transit.land</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whosonfirst.mapzen.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whosonfirst.mapzen.com&#x2F;</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;public-datasets&#x2F;terrain&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;public-datasets&#x2F;terrain&#x2F;</a>

Competition is a feature, not a bug -- you&#x27;re recalling a trope that has been a reactionary criticism to Adam Smith for centuries now, and was a core tenet of Marx&#x27;s ideas -- that with a little central planning, there wouldn&#x27;t be all of this effort wasted on competition.  The original communists really believed that a planned economy would be more efficient once enacted.  The fascists believed in the same basic inefficiency argument, but they thought that the government could control it while stil maintaining private property and traditional social structures.  In comparison to those two, neoliberal economic theory has done pretty well for itself.

&gt; When it&#x27;s just data you just do the same work twice.Monocultures are dangerous too.People differ on what to measure and how. Competition gives us an opportunity to try something new and potentially better. Especially when there isn&#x27;t a network effect (e.g. phone protocols).Also, the cost of this mapping apparently isn&#x27;t especially high.

Here’s the thing though - if everyone shared data, they could compete on the UX. Nobody says that pharmaceutical companies aren’t competitive on the end product, but they have a shared data set in the form of all the university research. Of course they get their own data, but being “free” to not have to do basic research themselves means they can put more resources towards the end product than data gathering

Not so fast! Competition only makes sense if you’re competing on the right things.Railroads should compete on service, quality and price. They should not compete by laying down parallel tracks side by side.Some things should be shared in common and competitive services built on top.

&gt; One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess.No, it&#x27;s actually a feature: competition. With a single product in every category it would be impossible to have diversity of ideas being tested and competing.It is the same with evolution.

I think you slightly missed the parent comment&#x27;s point, which is not that they should have walked away but rather have said &quot;man, we really want better maps and imaging for navigation, MapQuest has a great head start, we should work with them to make it even better&quot;. I&#x27;m not sure what economic model encourages that sort of behavior, though.

What if all the data was public and shared and different people could build their own representations. What if everyone collaborated?I disagree with the competition is always good. There are many cases where you are duplicating work. The best standard rarely wins (PCI vs MCA .. MCA was superior in many ways technologically .. was even hot pluggable, but PCI had better licensing).We get into a lot of repetition and the &#x27;best&#x27; product rarely wins. It&#x27;s more about marketing your product in a way people desire it. Example: Beats Audio Headphones.

Please don&#x27;t conflate competition and diversity. Competition is not a condition to diversity. I&#x27;d say that competition enforce a trade off between diversity and concentration of power.

This is the wrong way to think about things. Competition is good.If it weren&#x27;t for the need to compete, would Google have spent billions on innovations like Street View, Satellite imagery, Google Earth, etc. Or would they have just said, &quot;MapQuest has won the internet maps game, let&#x27;s just let MapQuest do their own thing. No use in doing the same work twice,&quot;

if they weren’t you’d just be complaining about how monopolies are a failure of capitalism.

Not quite. I think &quot;competition&quot; is overly glorified, but it does some things well. In this context, routing around path dependence is a key benefit. The upstart competitor in a field doesn&#x27;t have to &quot;waste&quot; a decade of investment &amp; infrastructure to bypass a methodology that has reached its maximum utility. The old method was cheaper for the incumbent to maintain, no amount of good will and collaborative spirit would convince them to turn their back on it for an unproven alternative. Any industry that has ever been &quot;disrupted&quot; is an industry shaken out of path dependence

The reuse value of this kind of data is critically dependant on the methodology used to create the data. A lot of Google data tends to understandably be focused on their own products and lack quality in a more generic sense. Something as simple as a building outline can be represented in several different ways depending on what you need and require a completely different methodology. The building outline needed by law enforcement is different to what an architect or pizza delivery company needz.When specific about the type of data there is a lot less competition than you might expect. And for commercial companies it makes sense to make as much money as possible front that.

Things like this make me think that it&#x27;s a shame humanity is duplicating all this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess.At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it&#x27;s just data you just do the same work twice.

I always thought this was officially a feature of maps ?I worked for a couple of years in a valley with only 2 access points.Quite often, when it is time to go back home, the trafic would be jammed.I activated Google Now (or at least I think it was already called that way ?) and without fail it would warn me that there is no point in leaving the building right now since everything was jammed.The same info was visible on maps.

I&#x27;ve heard stories, guesses, and claims that the current traffic data shown on google maps is potentially aggregated from smartphone GPS and accelerometer readings on android phones or though their Google apps. It&#x27;s crazy and amazing to just think about it.

Waze data does show up in Google Maps. If you click on one of the hazards or whatnot in Google Maps, it&#x27;ll often say it was reported via Waze.

Check this out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@47.0826736,-122.677911,16z&#x2F;data=!4m3!15m2!1m1!1s%2Fx%2Fsos-9021f5e64c4fec34!5m1!1e1?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@47.0826736,-122.677911,16z&#x2F;data...</a>

I&#x27;m still wondering why Waze doesn&#x27;t incorporate Google Maps data and Google Maps doesn&#x27;t incorporate Waze traffic data? Or does this already happen since Google has owned Waze for a while now? If not, I find it strange for the two to continue to be silo&#x27;d.

I would like to use it for these reasons, and also that the Apple Maps UI just feels a little nicer to me than the Google Maps app on iOS. There&#x27;s also the unfortunate fact that Apple doesn&#x27;t allow users to select a default maps application, so Apple maps integrates better with Messages and other 3rd party apps.But even with all of these reasons, Google&#x27;s data and search capabilities are so much better than Apple&#x27;s that they make Apple Maps feel unusable by comparison.

I use it primarily because of integration with the lock screen and integration with CarPlay.

Apple doesn&#x27;t allow non-apple maps apps to be used with CarPlay.

I use Apple Maps when walking because of the nice turn by turn  integration with the Apple Watch.

Apple Maps automatically tracks my parking location. Have to do that manually in GMaps.

I find it a much better view of the transit layer, and I actually enjoy its navigation UX, but that&#x27;s about it.

&quot;- No way to add a stop&quot;You can add a stop, but it&#x27;s limited to gas stations, coffee shops and restaurants. Why? I don&#x27;t know.

If I&#x27;m being 100% honest, no, other than better integration into the iOS ecosystem. For me, Apple Maps is pretty terrible all around. It feels like it was designed by a group of people that don&#x27;t actually drive anywhere.Issues:- Search results are terrible compared to Google&#x27;s.- While the UI is generally smoother, it lags behind (i.e. It shows a turn a good bit after I do). This is especially frustrating when driving through small city blocks and trying to be in the correct lane for the next turn.- Lane guidance was finally added, but no way to see ahead like in gmaps.- Day&#x2F;night mode is very fussy. When I&#x27;m driving through the Bay Bridge at night it constantly flips back and forth between day&#x2F;night due to the overhead lights.- It is pretty frustrating that the line ahead of me is constantly wobbling around instead of matching the curve&#x2F;line ahead of me. It feels disorienting and makes it difficult to see if there&#x27;s an upcoming left&#x2F;right ahead. Google generally does a good job trying to visually match what you&#x27;re seeing. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;t3Sxm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;t3Sxm</a>- If I check traffic when I wake up, then go through my morning routine, then check it again, there&#x27;s a 90% chance it&#x27;ll crash on startup.- No way to add a stop- No street viewand so on...

I&#x27;ve had the same experience, but is it Maps, or the continual use of GPS?

Google maps absolutely obliterates my battery life (iPhone 6S+).  Last time I travelled it I was down to 40% at noon.

Sounds like a problem with webgl? Try lite mode <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@?force=lite&amp;dg=dbrw&amp;newdg=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@?force=lite&amp;dg=dbrw&amp;newdg=1</a>.

Google Maps doesn&#x27;t work well at all on one of my Macs. In Safari, the 2D view works, but the 3D view doesn&#x27;t work. In Chrome, the satellite tiles are all black (but the roads are visible). In Firefox, the satellite and roads are both black.It&#x27;s the same (and most recent) version of all these browsers as my other Mac, where it works fine. How does one debug this? I&#x27;ve tried googling (ha) for every combination of words I can imagine. Google&#x27;s tech support seems basically nonexistent, for their free services.Or I can just open Maps.app, and it always works. The data isn&#x27;t as good but it&#x27;s not terrible, and at least the basics work fine. I&#x27;m not a heavy maps user so that&#x27;s good enough for me.

Do you have any coherent reasoning behind your characterization of Material as a &quot;total dumpster fire&quot;?   Other than &quot;I don&#x27;t like it and thus it must be bad?&quot;

Two reasons:1. Google’s Material UI is a total dumpster fire and I use it only as a last resort.2. Apple Maps integrates much better with everything else I’m using, so the experience is smoother (e.g., looking up an address on my laptop and then sending directions to my phone).I keep Google Maps around as a backup, mostly for places of interest way out in the boonies, like hiking trailheads.

I use Apple maps for navigation and Google maps for looking. Apple maps&#x27;s navigation does basic things like tell me what the next exit on the freeways, even thought it&#x27;s twenty miles away, so I have some idea what I need to do next. It knows that in the UK, roundabouts go by the city the road goes to next (on signs), instead of Google which uses road names (not on signs, useless). It tells me right before I need to turn, unlike Google which I always misinterpret. Apple maps seems to label the major roads better. Google maps seems to have decided that things like freeway numbers aren&#x27;t necessary until you zoom in really tight, which is extremely unhelpful when driving.Google maps, however, knows where everything is, everywhere. Also, you can download offline maps and get navigation in the middle of nowhere.

Apple Maps, OSM, etc are needed because even weak competition forces Google Maps to keep improving

* Apple Maps has better navigation in Oakland than Google
* Transit instructions are vastly superior.

On iOs&#x2F;mobile, Apple Maps has a much prettier, more usable UI. All the buildings are shown 3d in Bay Area during navigation. Google maps does not show 3d while navigating. From this point of view, Apple offers a superior user experience. That&#x27;s why I use it.I switch to Google when traffic is really bad, as I trust its timing estimates more.

Is there a reason anyone uses Apple Maps, aside from wanting to avoid Google out of principle&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;monoculture concerns? To be clear, these are entirely legitimate reasons, but I was wondering if the product has any direct benefits for the user (which is a coherent subset of reasons given the modal users&#x27; level of concern about systemic issues).I&#x27;m not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very little about Apple Maps beyond the bad press its gotten and Apple&#x27;s general software product competency weaknesses.EDIT: Thanks for the responses, that&#x27;s all pretty much the kind of thing I was wondering about

I reckon Google&#x27;s 3D building designer, that allowed people to plot buildings and place them on the map was used to train an AI to create buildings from features ... maybe. The page says satellite data, matched with street level, but I often see planes flying over my UK city and imagine they could do radar or similar tracking to match with visual data.

This was definitely planned, only perhaps not in this kind of detail. The Geo organization&#x27;s motto paralleled the company&#x27;s (to organize the world&#x27;s information, etc. etc.), only at a geospatial level.The data you see in Google Maps came and probably still comes from a pipeline of pipelines that rebuild the whole planet on a regular schedule. Since we&#x27;re talking about all of Earth, random stuff here and there could cause hiccups and delays. Information comes from all sorts of sources, including custom HW (streetview camera, etc.), flying their own planes, owning a satellite company for a few years, and so on.In one shape or another, it all predates Tensorflow by years.

I do not get what makes this post so popular. Google Maps is often better and uses automatically extracted features from photogrammetry. Eh. 350 points at most.

tl;dr - Google Maps has buildings and Areas of Interest (streets with more businesses) based on satellite &amp; street view data.&quot;Google is creating data out of data ... It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next&quot;My guess is that they weren&#x27;t planning it. Somebody decided to use their 20% time to learn TensorFlow and process the Street View imagery for fun, and that side project got promoted into Maps.When I downloaded 10 years of church notice sheets, I was trying to get the lyrics of the songs in Chinese. I later realised that I could also find the most common song names, and then focus my Chinese-learning on those songs. Big data is all about gathering more data than you know what to do with, and figuring it all out as you go.

The problem in Singapore is that Apple (or whoever they contract this to) hasn&#x27;t updated major parts of the city in several years - Go take a look at Maxwell Road near the Singapore Chinese Cultural Center connecting to Central Blvd from Straits Blvd - that road hasn&#x27;t been there since 2015 (at least, maybe longer) - but Apple Still says that it exists and uses it for directions.Maps are one area where Apple has a &quot;meh, good enough&quot; attitude, but Google really seems to want to really bring the next level of quality.

In Singapore the Apple Maps capabilities seem to be a little better, after they introduced bus lines a couple of months ago I’m using it as my main guide to go around the city or when I’m lost. The general direction is always correct, points of interest or businesses are sometimes missing, but it feels like they’re improving, so I don’t think they gave up on it. I think they just don’t put so much effort on it compared to Google, because the data gathered from the service doesn’t have the same value for Apple.

The problem for Apple is why would anyone want to use &quot;good enough&quot; when the alternatives are better, free, and easily available?

i so badly want apple maps to be good enough but it&#x27;s not there yet. maps is the only google product i use regularly (i use apple maps maybe 20% of the time).apple has hundreds of billions in the bank, so they could easily fix the problem if they wanted to. but they (mistakenly, imho) don&#x27;t see it as core to their business so it limps along like it does.

The problem with maps is that in order to be reliable, they need to work everywhere - in familiar areas, people know where they&#x27;re going; but it&#x27;s the weirder parts where they start to really care about the accuracy of maps. It&#x27;s not sufficient for you not to be lead astray in LA, the question is whether you&#x27;re sure enough to rely on it when driving through a rural area in the middle of USA or on a business trip overseas to a country you&#x27;ve never been to - can you be sure that you can just type in your destination, follow the directions, and actually get where you should be even if you have no idea about any of the landmarks?

To offer a counterpoint, I decided to start alternating
between Apple Maps and Google Maps a few months ago and — so far — I haven’t been led astray by Apple Maps. I do live in L.A., however, which is probably among the best case scenarios for Apple Maps at the moment.Google does have the better product, but for the most part I can see Apple Maps being at least “good enough” for my use, much the same way that Safari, for me at least, is “good enough” compared to Chrome. Unfortunately, anecdotes of Apple Maps underperforming are all too common, and I think Apple needs to keep investing (and probably a lot) if they intend to win users over.

The problem I have with GM is that it will often send me past my destination, then have me do a U-turn, in an apparent attempt to make sure the building is on the right side of the street.  Even if there is no center divider and a left turn lane.  Even if there is a traffic-light-controlled intersection to get me into the parking lot of the building.

i had bad experiences with Uber and Lyft in the Bay Area, and mostly because of Google Maps and lousy GPS chipsets on the bargain basement phones everyone seemed to be using. GPS that was taking forever to lock on, so drivers were missing turns and having to backtrack.here in Texas, different story. Although Google Maps isn&#x27;t always that great with the parallel service roads that we have all over the place.

Google Maps has sent me astray a few times as well. Strangely, I&#x27;ve had the worst experience with GM in the Bay area.Going to the Golden Gate Recreation Area, Google Maps sent me to a trailhead parking lot instead of the visitor&#x27;s center. And for a small business near the Bay Model, GM directions stopped about half a mile away, and the map pin was on top of the Bay Model building.

Interestingly, Apple maps seems to have more accurate maps in some places like Chiang Mai, Thailand.  I&#x27;ve noticed locals there using Maps instead of Google Maps

I usually use Google maps, but after being led astray like 3 times while visiting LA recently, switched to Apple maps there. Google maps seemed basically broken in LA while I was there. ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Google&#x27;s not infallible either. I was looking at a map and noticed that it labelled a restaurant called OPH in Chanhassen, MN. The Original Pancake House is one of my favorite restaurants and is sometimes abbreviated OPH, so I was intrigued. Going to the street view you can see that it&#x27;s a purely residential area with a park and a pool and no restaurant in sight. Try it for yourself.

I reported a pharmacy that was supposedly in my neighbours garden. On about the 3rd or 4th report (over a year) it was removed.

It seems they wanted to be Google Maps but failed. You raise a very interesting point with OpenStreetMap - just like WebKit, Apple could just have put some of their billions into boosting that effort, I agree that this would have been way more productive, especially given how engaged smartphone users are with their maps.

Apple Maps still struggles with POI accuracy, and speed of map data updates, but it&#x27;s much better than it was since launch.

I was using Apple Maps a few weeks ago, and wanted to get something to eat. I saw a place called “Shake Shack” and decided to go there. Not only did it not exist, I checked online, there has never been a Shake Shack in my town, there’s only a handful in my country.How Apple Maps got that wrong, I honestly don’t know. Where did the data come from, and why is it that incorrect?I reported it, and it’s since been removed, but I can’t do that for everything in my town, and there’s so much missing; I can’t report that, or edit the map like you can on OpenStreetMap.Honestly, why does Apple Maps exist? Either it needs to be like Google Maps (and just work), or be like OpenStreetMap and let Apple fans edit the map and get more involved.I gave them a lot of patience and understanding years ago (mapping the world is hardly an easy task), but my patience has run out. It’s been a shit show from day one and I honestly don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I&#x27;ve noticed that Google maps doesn&#x27;t correctly render a spaghetti junction near my neighbourhood ...Amsterdam is a very interesting case. From my own personal experience it&#x27;s very easy to get lost there. There&#x27;s even a coffee shop with that name!

I was using Google Maps in Amsterdam a few months ago and tried to go to a restaurant. Google Maps led me into a tunnel and in the middle was it was happy to announce I reached my destination. It happened to be that this restaurant was located on an island above the tunnel and I actually drove right under it. I have no experience with Apple Maps though.

This doesn&#x27;t seem like a hard problem to solve. My guess is that Apple just gave upApple under Tim Cook isn&#x27;t interested in hard problems. But hey, look at their amazing animated poop icon!

I accidentally used Apple Maps once as I was going to a (new) doctor&#x27;s office. I realized I was using Apple maps halfway through my drive and I joked with myself that it wouldn&#x27;t bring me to the right place. I was heading to a fairly large medical complex in Orange County (CA) and I sort-of had an idea of where I was going anyway, but boy, was I wrong.According to Apple maps, the doctor&#x27;s office was literally in the middle of a field. I missed it the first time around (drove past it for a few miles, following my GPSs instructions) and then soon realized that I was already going through residential areas.Never again, Apple. For context, this was 3 months ago. This doesn&#x27;t seem like a hard problem to solve. My guess is that Apple just gave up.

Lenses don&#x27;t work that way, surely. Any image taken directly downwards will include angled elements offset at a greater angle away from the centre line. Also, how hard is it to add an extra camera or two if you&#x27;re already flying over, sure double&#x2F;triple the data but that must be relatively easy to handle once you have the infrastructure for image handling and such.

Or with lighting from different angles - different time of day.

Do we know how Google obtains this data ?Could drones be used here ? It looks like it would be a good way to refresh this data often on the cheap.(drone is the loosest sense, a balloon would do the trick)

They fly their own planes these days.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;topics&#x2F;inside-google&#x2F;google-earths-incredible-3d-imagery-explained&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;topics&#x2F;inside-google&#x2F;google-earths-incre...</a>Too bad it&#x27;s a video. Fast forward about 2 minutes.Or: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;suo_aUTUpps?t=121" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;suo_aUTUpps?t=121</a>Fly plane. Zig zag. 5 cameras, then photogrammetry. StreetView, from planes.

Aeroplanes and satellites take successive overlapping tiles of the same area as they move. This gives data from multiple angles.

You need aerial imagery from different angles.Thats surprisingly hard to buy from imagery providers, because most of them only want to point their cameras directly downwards.

These building footprints, complete with height detail, are algorithmically created by taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to render the building shapes.I could have guessed that before the punchline. And it&#x27;s not that difficult to add for a company with tens of billions in cash. What are you doing, Apple? Fix your OS and Maps!

It&#x27;s a bit of a hack but I run Waze in the background when I&#x27;m doing navigation via Google Maps. It&#x27;ll play a sound at me when I exceed the speed limit and it&#x27;ll warn me about upcoming road hazards (and cops!).

Google Maps has a show speed limit toggle, behind a setting.

I switched as well, for different reasons. Some things I found that I liked about apple maps: its navigation has speed limit information and I much prefer its design. It seems less busy, and it gets out of my way. Something about google maps just felt really cramped. I know that sounds really subjective, but I enjoyed using one more than the other.That said, google has better directions and estimates. And maybe that should trump all. It hasn’t been enough of an issue to convince me to reinstall.

Let me give the experiment more time, it’s only been a few thousand miles, but so far I’ve found it in SF Bay Area to be equally as good. And I prefer it’s design to google maps or waze.Did you try recently or in the 2011 debut debacle era? Honestly for the longest time it was in my junk folder due to bad early experiences.

In the Midwest, Google isn&#x27;t that great either. On a site I run I often have automatically-generated links to Google Maps where my software puts the business name and then the street address into a Google Maps search and half the time it fails. But if I just put the address without the business name, it brings me to the right spot.Driving to my grandparents house until two or three years ago, Google would route you off a paved highway down an impassable two-track road only to bring you back around to the highway later.When you&#x27;re up against that kind of technology, Apple Maps doesn&#x27;t seem so painful.

Do you ever manage to get where you&#x27;re actually trying to go though? ;)In all seriousness, I&#x27;ve found Apple Maps search to be absolutely horrendous, either missing places or having them in the wrong spot.

Or buy a proper hiking GPS. Garmin makes great products. They also run off two AA batteries for like a week.

&gt; I was thinking the same thing of &quot;who cares.&quot;&gt; I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive.Intersting, I have the opposite opinion precisely because I walk to most places. Building outlines give you a good idea of where you can walk–often taking the Manhattan path through a city is suboptimal, and you can cut through blocks based on what&#x27;s in them. Building outlines let you know if there are alleyways that you can go through.

I was thinking the same thing of &quot;who cares.&quot;I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive. I need street names, and GMaps have made them harder and harder to see for years:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justinobeirne.com&#x2F;what-happened-to-google-maps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justinobeirne.com&#x2F;what-happened-to-google-maps&#x2F;</a>I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It&#x27;s annoying as fuck since it&#x27;s the most important thing on the map when walking in a city to orientate yourself (because we all know those digital compasses are garbage).I should really just carry a magnetic compass on my key chain again.I really miss the classic maps interface. More streets, more relevant detail and much much faster. Classic maps that used the whole screen without the white area on the left, and the vector rendering tech would have been way better than their crappy web interface now.

I recently switched to Apple maps primary for car play after 10+ years. I haven’t looked back.Building outlines are not much of a moat for me.

Google Earth used to have a very basic flight sim. Not sure if it still does, though.

There&#x27;s already a flight simulator in the Google Earth desktop app, under the Tools menu.

Didn&#x27;t google earth have exactly this in the early days? I can&#x27;t remember exact details, but pretty sure it was an easter egg - ctrl + alt + a would launch it.

When can we get a flight simulator using Google Maps data? It doesn&#x27;t need the fidelity of data for names of streets, places, etc. just the imagery.If they can extrapolate building details like bay windows, then they should be able to model entire areas from enough heights and angles to represent it much better than what I&#x27;ve seen in flight simulators for personal use (at least last I looked).

But they do have Android and all the smartphones that use Android or have Google maps installed and those smartphones also probably have GPS recivers and accelerometers.

Makes me wonder what their end goal is. It&#x27;s a bit unnerving.

That&#x27;s the real reason why they invest so much in self-driving cars. It&#x27;ll be just millions and millions of eyes for them.

I can tell Google is pretty upset that they don&#x27;t have real time cams everywhere.

I think you&#x27;re confusing ideas&#x2F;features with execution. Apple knew very well at the onset what to build. But they executed poorly and underestimated the amount of non-trivial human involvement in correcting mistakes and combining many layers of information into a cohesive and [mostly] robust experience.These kinds of applications aren&#x27;t Apple&#x27;s strong suit, and Google is years ahead on technical abilities on the data correction and feedback front as well as custom satellite hardware and software design. Although Apple may be moving on that [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5mac.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;apple-satellite-hardware-project-google-execs-maps-ar&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5mac.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;apple-satellite-hardware-proj...</a>

Maybe it&#x27;s naive of me, but I would assume it won&#x27;t take 6 years for Apple to redo the work that Google is ahead on. For one thing, they now know a specific feature to work toward, which cuts some time out. Then, they can likely throw more cycles at this problem than Google could 6 years ago, again reducing Google&#x27;s lead. Lastly, they probably have a lot of stored raw data (satellite images specifically) that Google didn&#x27;t have at the start and took time to collect multiple angles over time.

I was pleasantly surprised to how much attention to detail and thought goes into the cartography design on Google Maps. Just yesterday, I noticed this little gem when searching for the Channel Islands off of California: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;Channel+Islands+National+Park&#x2F;@33.9639291,-120.0316649,11z&#x2F;data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x80e852ce2cb67915:0xf5e49558723a3acc!8m2!3d34.002611!4d-119.7099239" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;Channel+Islands+National+P...</a>Try zooming in and zooming out slowly and watch what happens to the labeling of the islands since they are actually a collection.

With their cash pile, they could surely expand, considering the long term returns on such expansion of computing power. Maybe Apple just dosent see the need to improve or dosent see any revenue potential with Maps.

About 3GW of computing power. No really.Apple lacks the raw computing capacity to be able to pull this off, even if they had the algorithms and data already.

On the other hand, Google had a huge head start in developing robust voice recognition with GOOG-411. Whereas Alexa and Siri are more or less at parity, from what I&#x27;ve heard.But, I own neither an Echo, nor an Android, and I&#x27;m still running iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S.

I think a big part of this, at least when compared to google, is Siri&#x27;s issues with language understanding rather than converting the audio to text. Google is much better at picking up on contextual details simply because they have such a huge background in doing so for search.

Apple had a huge head start with Siri but has been surpassed quite handily by Google and Amazon for some time now. I&#x27;m not sure we can simply rely on the passage of time for Apple to improve these large projects.

My heuristic is that it&#x27;s usually faster to catch-up to something that already exists than it is to invent something new. Given sufficient effort Apple should be able to asymptotically approach Google&#x27;s capabilities. But considering the other two points I mentioned, it&#x27;s not a given that they will.

&gt;Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they&#x27;ll be close to parity.So you expect Google to stand around for 3 or more years while Apple comes close to parity with Google today?

&gt; what is holding Apple back?If you worked at Apple would you want to be working on Apple Maps? I just doubt any of the core talents in Apple are interested in it at all, it&#x27;s not what the company is known for.

Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back?My ideas:- Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they&#x27;ll be close to parity.- Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage data, and the Maps API.- Google&#x27;s use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass image classification.

Maybe all those smart engineers could put their heads together and figure out how to not zoom into street view when I want to view a picture on a review. And maybe return me to where I was in the review list instead of taking me back to the top level business information. What a feat of engineering that would be.

&gt; is available for the low price of attributionThat depends. The OSM licence requirements depends on what you do. If you don&#x27;t produce a geo database, then there&#x27;s only an attribution requirement, otherwise you have to attribute and release changes to the data you made, along with any other data that you mixed in.It&#x27;s like BSD for some uses, and GPL for others.

I noticed the swap only because - at least in  my residential neighborhood in a small city - OSM has sidewalk data on their maps, which Google did not.

Niantic switched Pokémon Go and Ingress over to using OpenStreetMap as the base map last week.That&#x27;s one way OSM can compete with Google, it is available for the low price of attribution. Pokémon players have quite some interest in improving OSM.OSM can also end up with data for things that Google doesn&#x27;t find interesting. Google doesn&#x27;t have the nice walking path&#x2F;bike trail in a local park that I added to OSM several years ago.

&gt; this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can it ever hope to catch up?When OSM started in 2004 (before Google Maps), the only real place you could get map data was from governments. The idea of everyone walking around with GPSes to make their own map sounds like it&#x27;ll never work. And yet here we are.&gt; This isn&#x27;t a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online&#x2F;software encyclopedias).The encyclopedia market did exist, for decades, before Wikipedia. I&#x27;ll bet very few people are buying family encyclopedias now.

I am thankful for projects like OpenStreetMaps. If I ever switch to a libre mobile operating system it, will take little time to get OSM-based maps app there.Main priority of giant corporations is money, no matter what. They will always support mainstream closed platforms only.

Hmm, this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can it ever hope to catch up? This isn&#x27;t a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online&#x2F;software encyclopedias). Instead, you have to face off against giants with enormous resources and the money for any type of data. Amateur volunteers working on their own areas won&#x27;t really be able to keep up. And it&#x27;ll be even harder to recruit more workers because the competition is so entrenched&#x2F;good while OSM can be subpar in some aspects. Oh, and these volunteers will instead give their time to Google because it&#x27;s something they already know and use (I have a friend who does things like answer questions, take pictures of places, for points).

Yeah, here the buildings quickly disappear outside of dense areas. Which could be a result of prioritizing the denser areas with an automated system, but there&#x27;s lots of missing buildings in the built up areas too.

I think people generally wildly underestimate the scope and impact of Ground Truth (or are entirely ignorant of it).Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They&#x27;d fix the obvious big public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive organization that Apple just didn&#x27;t have, wasn&#x27;t likely to build, and couldn&#x27;t license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data, business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps app, and I just didn&#x27;t see any way that Apple was going to come even close to Google&#x27;s map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to me was if&#x2F;how quickly they&#x27;d reach &quot;good enough&quot; status for their users to avoid tarnishing their brand.Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they&#x27;d been led astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed, took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed, and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I&#x27;d personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance server as well (my QPS is pathetic).

I was surprised how the post yammered on about extracting data from street view .. when a lot of data is added by humans (Local Guides) and by business owners themselves.

Google also uses (used?) a great deal of human judgment in Maps (note: these sources are a few years old now) [1, 2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;google-maps-ground-truth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;google-maps-ground-truth&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2012&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything&#x2F;261913&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2012&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-g...</a>

I&#x27;ve been an apple maps user since day 0 - and other than a sometime annoying inability to FIND an address - its been remarkably reliable for me - even driving to places in the middle of nowhere - YMMV though - if you live in a different place, your luck may vary significantly.I&#x27;m also not someone who gets lost easy either however, and learned how to navigate pre-GPS - so again, YMMV.

I wonder if they are using a technique similar to pix2pix (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;phillipi&#x2F;pix2pix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;phillipi&#x2F;pix2pix</a>) under the hood to turn satellite images into structure depth maps.

The direction capabilities is what makes me use google maps more, it’s just more reliable in general and gives better routes.  Sometimes Apple would give these really dumb routes. I would say ‘why would you do that?’

&gt; They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn&#x27;t seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapesAre they not? The area around me has somewhat decent outlines of stuff like trees that I&#x27;d assume is coming from the satellite data, since it looks too odd for a human to do manually…&gt; I don&#x27;t get the feeling anybody actually likes itI enjoy using it. It&#x27;s well integrated with iOS (and IMHO looks prettier than Google Maps as well).

It&#x27;s surprising to me that Apple has 3D building data from Flyover already, but doesn&#x27;t use it. They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn&#x27;t seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapes - even if it requires human sorting, Apple does have billions of dollars. They could end up with more detailed buildings on their 2D view than Google.That being said, they probably simply don&#x27;t care. Maps is a means to an end for Apple, and likely not itself a direct money maker. People use it because Apple has a captive audience - you can&#x27;t set your default Maps app on the iPhone to anything else. I don&#x27;t get the feeling anybody actually likes it, altho I do enjoy using Flyover to see those 3d scans from time to time.Minor criticism of this great article: a side-by-side view of the images would be better for comparison and more comfortable to the user than an automatically changing gif.

I was curious about these &quot;internet points&quot;, and found this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;google-maps-updates-it-local-guides-program-with-a-new-points-system-and-more-levels&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;google-maps-updates-it-loc...</a>&quot;... guides who get to level four will now get three months of free access to Google Play Music and 75 percent off rentals in the Google Play Movie store.&quot;

Just to make sure, you&#x27;re aware that this information you&#x27;re contributing is to the benefit of a company that has no interest in sharing the data back with you if it&#x27;s not a financial win for them? Because that&#x27;s the reason I don&#x27;t want to contribute: I can&#x27;t even export my own changes in a standard format, let alone our collective contributions or even all data.

I&#x27;ve added a lot of those places manually through the &quot;Add a missing place&quot; in the menu. The review process either takes 2 days or stays in limbo forever. Google maps also gamified the contribution process so you can get internet points for improving their maps.

OSM often has things that are barely more than animal tracks. It&#x27;s pretty awesome when you want to go exploring.

Yeah I agree 1000%, at least for New Zealand, any tracks that art super popular aren&#x27;t on Google, but most are on OSM.Not to mention, I find seeing Googles walking tracks kinda hard, especially if you&#x27;re new to an area and want to see what tracks are around.

Yep, though I use All Trails when actually on the trail, it&#x27;s fantastic. I just appreciate seeing trails (and trailheads as POIs) when using Google Maps for drives.

Although I find, in a lot of places, that OpenStreetMaps is a lot better than Google for hiking trails.

Knowing that you&#x27;re looking at a mountain range isn&#x27;t clutter! Nor is a different map layer for topographic contour lines.

&gt; There&#x27;s also no relief shading to tell where the mountains are or a terrain view for contour lines.At least in my experience, this is done to keep the view uncluttered. The data is still there, and turning on Satellite view+3D shows the mountains and hills.

Google also has a giant lead in trails &#x2F; feature names. I hike a ton and Google has been adding trails at a brisk pace. I just checked the Snoqualmie Pass area about an hour outside of Seattle and Apple Maps has almost no trails, named mountains or named lakes (even quite large ones). A few trails show up as unnamed roads. There&#x27;s also no relief shading to tell where the mountains are or a terrain view for contour lines.

I&#x27;ve driven highway 154 many times. It&#x27;s nowhere near as bad as you say, and is actually a nice break from 101.

You&#x27;re talking about 154, right? It&#x27;s not that bad…

I recognize this. I live in a part of the Netherlands where there is only ONE highway going through the area. Yet Google Maps and TomTom both want to send me through the nature reserve instead of via the highway running parallel to the nature reserve. The reason is that the route through the nature reserve is a few kilometers shorter and the speed limits are set wrong. Both Google Maps and TomTom think you can drive at highway speeds on those roads.Signs have been setup to block cars from entering those roads during morning and evening rush hour. But still you see many people taking that road, blindly following the map instructions.

Yep. Normally they prefer the side route. I&#x27;m sure if traffic is bad on the side route they will adapt and take the sensible route instead.

Do you mean you would prefer the 101 route? That&#x27;s what both Google, Bing as well as all OSM routers I tried suggested. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;vIWC5ti.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;vIWC5ti.png</a>

Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps will all try to murder you if you ask for directions from Santa Maria, CA to Ventura, CA.The obvious route is to follow the freeway that was built on the best route between the two cities. Instead, all three really enjoy routing you onto a two-lane twisty mountain road that is five minutes shorter if you are driving a sports car and all the lights are green. Heaven help you if you are driving an RV.I&#x27;ve sent corrections to both Google and Apple about this. They both did nothing.

I don&#x27;t get why this was downwoted? By using google maps one contribute back traffic data and route problems for free + you share your position which can be sold to billboard advertisers for analysis...

Android is a botnet that is collecting data.  Google should be paying you to use their harvesters.

I’m only aware of one government postal org that uses w3w. Are there others beyond Côte d&#x27;Ivoire?

I don&#x27;t understand your &quot;what it means&quot; statement. Can you elaborate a little bit plz?

While the concept is interesting, the issue I have with What3Words is that they force you to use their service to figure out what an address actually means. In other words, you can&#x27;t use it at all without being bound to their whims. Kind of a big deal when working with something as open and public and universal as addresses.

Almost every Sunday morning I put my kayak at mere.digests.undergo. I could say &quot;at the 8th line bridge North of West Montrose, ON, Canada&quot; or I could say at &quot;43.624987N, 80.447249W&quot; or I could say let&#x27;s meet at OLC &quot;86MXJHG3+247&quot; or &quot;JHF3+X4 Inverhaugh&quot;. Yeah - some of the clones sound funny but not useful in real world social interaction.

Is it really more convenient? Coordinates make sense to everyone and every map tool can understand them. W3W phrases are useless unless you happen to have the app.Also, there are a few amusing clones... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.what3fucks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.what3fucks.com&#x2F;</a>

The problem of &quot;under addressed&quot; places in the world is addressed (no pun intended) by several companies. Eg. What3Words (w3w.co) has created a grit of 3mx3m squares which cover the entire planet. Each of this squares is identified by three words. Post&#x2F;Mail organizations in several countries already accept those addresses. Google also has the OLC (Open Location Code) to address an area of adjustable size on earth. I find w3w very convinient to communicate a place over a voice connection (radio) or by writing it down on paper. Nothing you couldn&#x27;t do by sending latitude and longitude, but more convinient.

It varies. I can always tell when they change the map provider and&#x2F;or data in my area, because my Uber Eats drivers start getting lost at different intersections.If I look up my home address on Google Maps, it puts the pin in the correct location, at the actual residence. But as of a few days ago, the Uber Eats drivers aren&#x27;t making it past the mailboxes at the end of my (long) driveway. They no longer appear to be showing the drivers my GPS location at all, just the location associated with the address of the residential mailbox. Very annoying in a first-world problem kind of way.

From 2016: (what is the latest?)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-map-API-technology-did-Uber-use-to-add-the-map-functionality-to-its-app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-map-API-technology-did-Uber-use-t...</a>

A good summary, if a bit repetitive, of how Apple has fallen behind in the mapping department since Scott Forstall&#x27;s fateful call to divorce the company from Google Maps. But I think he buries a rather important lede farther down in the post:<pre><code> That sounds great—but living in San Francisco, 
 it’s hard to imagine this working smoothly. That’s 
 because half the time I request a ride, I have to 
 text&#x2F;call the (Uber) driver to coordinate my pickup spot.
</code></pre>
The company that really needs to fire its entire cartography department and rebuild or license a new one from scratch is Uber. The deficiencies in their maps add a ton of unnecessary friction to the customer experience, and not just in crowded urban areas. I can only imagine the frustration their drivers must feel, especially since quite a few of them aren&#x27;t native English speakers.If I were Uber&#x27;s new CEO, I&#x27;d treat mapping and location services as a class-one emergency, up there with any others that people commonly criticize the company for.

Sadly you are stuck buying it from a satellite company (expensive) or buying your own satellites (more expensive). My feeling is that &#x27;Maps&#x27; is Google&#x27;s insurance policy against the erosion of search advertising margin.I could easily see Google making turn by turn or map detail a &quot;small&quot; $4.99&#x2F;month service rather than having it be free.

Detailed maps are certainly valuable. Getting those from satellites is impressive, and requires high-resolution imagery as well as lots of computing power.We can get some satellite imagery for free from weather satellites, but it&#x27;s nowhere near the resolution needed for street maps.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;grabbing-raw-images-from-a-new-russian-satellite&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;grabbing-raw-images-from-a-n...</a>

&gt; And if you turn the problem into an algorithm that can be parceled up between machines, you have way more of that than people. It&#x27;s the one thing that the previous generation of computer companies didn&#x27;t getAnd some open source data initiatives. Open Street Map, for all it&#x27;s glory, is surprisingly anti-automation. There&#x27;s a lot of stuff that could probably be done with programs that they refuse because it&#x27;s too hard to peer review the massive resulting changesets. Which is unfortunate, because there&#x27;s a huge potential for processing images from places like Planet to provide new data and annotations that we&#x27;ll just straight up miss out on.

A couple of things stand out for me from the article, one is that this sort of aerial image to detailed map was one of the things the US Government was doing with satellite images in the 70&#x27;s, and with Google&#x27;s compute resources if it this seems like the kind of &#x27;side&#x27; use that would be encouraged. It is certainly a more useful use of compute resources than computing cryptohashes :-).The second thing was that Google owns all of their data. When I was there Maps was pretty new, Google was digesting the acquisition of the Keyhole folks (who became Google Earth) and was complaining bitterly about how restrictive the usage rights were for the map data from a major mapping company. They kicked off a program to become independent of third parties for map data and to have the most accurate data in the world.And if you turn the problem into an algorithm that can be parceled up between machines, you have way more of that than people. It&#x27;s the one thing that the previous generation of computer companies didn&#x27;t get, when computers are cheap having 50,000 of them isn&#x27;t all that much different than having 5,000 especially if you can code up ways for them to route around damage. I think Maps is a good indication of what you can do when you think like that.

Does it not depend on the area? I believe that not all street view cars had lidar capability.Very cool app!

I wonder how much of this building information comes from the LiDAR data the StreetView cameras capture along with images. It&#x27;s a couple of years old now but I wrote something to display the 3D point data for any address and was surprised to find just now that it still works. 
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;callumprentice.github.io&#x2F;apps&#x2F;street_cloud&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;callumprentice.github.io&#x2F;apps&#x2F;street_cloud&#x2F;index.html</a>I wonder if there is a more detailed data set available these days.

I just figure they are using the average of other people who took the exact same trip last week when conditions were similar.

The crazy thing to me is that it&#x27;s pretty decent at estimating even in dynamic traffic conditions. Consider US101 in the Bay area at rush hour - if you leave San Jose around 6pm, you&#x27;ll drive straight into traffic, but by the time you get to SF it&#x27;ll be significantly lighter. A lesser algorithm would give you a time prediction based on current traffic speeds at all points along your path, which would give you a wildly pessimistic estimate when you leave and only converge when you get close to your destination. But Maps has enough data to know that at that time of day traffic is trending better, and by how much.

I have the same opinion about their acquisition of Waze. But I think Waze itself as a GPS is quite frustrating. It tells me to take the worst local road, when Google Map takes me the better route (the exact route I would have taken anyway without the GPS). After tryig a few times I have given up on Waze completely. I feel Google is using Waze for getting additional usee data points.

Their acquisition of Waze really gave them the edge here. Waze has been getting better and better at predicting times. I find that in most situations it is rarely off by more than a minute or two.

It&#x27;s a problem that seems really simple until you dig into it. Traffic usually changes, and that&#x27;s hard to predict. In broad strokes it&#x27;s a &quot;simple problem&quot; but that&#x27;s true of so many things (from bridges to self-driving cars). The complexity is in handling all the subtleties and edge cases and tuning everything so that the results actually are accurate.

I think it is actually not a highly complex algo. They have enough data to simply look at people who took the exact same or almost the same trip at the same time of day. Mix that with a bit of user provided traffic data to make sure it is similar to the comparisons and viola.

I find that the time estimates can vary a lot when driving long distances. I think that you get a lot more variability in travel time in the countryside though, depending on driver confidence and experience.I usually manage to knock a 4.5 hour drive down to 4 hours or less.

It&#x27;s not just unpaved roads. I also find that &quot;private&quot; roads (inside gated communities) around me are often extremely far off in terms of speed limit. There are private roads around here with speed limits of 45+ MPH that Google seems to calculate as 15-25MPH. It really throws off the time estimates if you&#x27;re coming from or going to one of those neighborhoods. And it&#x27;s been like that for YEARS. If they were using user-generated data, I&#x27;d expect that it would eventually get better, but I&#x27;ve seen no evidence of it. Waze does a better job at this.

One (totally unverified, bu) hypothesis that I have is that they drastically underestimate speed on roads that are rarely used by cars but frequently used by farming vehicles; they&#x27;re using user data to estimate the speeds, they can see that the &#x27;usual&#x27; vehicle going there is driving 30 kph but they can&#x27;t see that it&#x27;s a tractor pulling a wagon of hay.

I don&#x27;t think the paving has as much to do with this as the smartphone traffic. I find drives on rural paved roads with no cell reception and low population are often overestimated by 30%. Maybe I drive too fast on these roads. I certainly appreciate Google keeping other drivers off these roads, however.

Interestingly enough i was really surprised when i used Gmaps in Thailand and Cambodia with the exact same issue of bad roads. It was usually accurate. However i think i always had cell signal so your assumption likely is right.

Very much agree, with only one caveat: unpaved roads.Google Maps estimates are wildly off when parts of the drive are along unpaved roads in Australia. It assumes a ludicrously low speed of 30-40 km&#x2F;h for such roads, when most cars are able to go 80+ km&#x2F;h, depending on the road. I&#x27;ve beaten Google arrival estimates by more than 2 hours on some drives.When planning drives involving unpaved sections, we usually ask Google for the estimates for the paved sections (which are generally accurate), then estimate the unpaved sections based on the distance and a guess at a reasonable speed for the road.I&#x27;ve also noticed that Google is much better at estimating speeds along unpaved roads that have mobile signal coverage. It seems like it uses user-generated driving data for them to some extent, but not at all for the ones without coverage. This leads me to think that they accept real-time user data, but will not &quot;queue&quot; the gathered data on the app for uploading later, when mobile signal is available.This seems like a strange decision, given that unpaved roads and lack of mobile coverage correlate by nature. I suppose it&#x27;s probably a security-minded decision, to prevent malicious agents from easily uploading bad data. Or maybe a quirk of the way Waze data plays into this.

They did that recently in India - not sure if and when they&#x27;ll roll it out to the rest of the world.

I sometimes got the impression they do but still present it as car. I&#x27;ve got highly unrealistic driving times of a car in Bangkok that were very close to my actual driving time on a scooter for example.

Seems tougher to do estimation specifically for motorcyclists.Some areas allow lane splitting, others don&#x27;t. Some riders are on tourers that can&#x27;t hop through traffic but can maintain highway speeds comfortably, others ride single-cylinder dual sport bikes that can&#x27;t maintain 60 without taking a physical toll on the rider. And every rider has a slightly different risk tolerance, which translates to different behavior in traffic. I personally don&#x27;t mind lane splitting between two semi trucks cruising abreast at highway speed, but I get anxious squeezing through cramped city traffic. And I slow down considerably anywhere a SMIDSY might happen, even if I have the right of way.Also, it may be difficult for Google to identify who is riding a motorcycle from location data alone, which is what they would use to generate the motorcycle estimations. Not sure how they would do it...maybe using accelerometer&#x2F;gyro data to identify inward leans during turns? The assumption being that cars will lean outwards, while bikes will lean inwards.

I wish they introduced a &quot;motorcycle&quot; vehicle type. At least for cities, it makes a big difference in arrival time estimations.

One thing I really appreciate about Google Maps is how accurate the times are. There have been numerous times where google maps says is will take x minutes to get there and I think &quot;Nah, I&#x27;ll be able to get there faster than that.&quot; Nope, I&#x27;ve never had google maps be off by more than a minute or so.  I think it must take into account not just road conditions and traffic, but also how much I am likely to go over the speed limit.

Google Maps' Moat