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Street address errors in Google Maps

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Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#111

Post by pests »

layman51 wrote: post #80
Dylan16807 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pick from multiple city names on tons of addresses. But that's a lot less exciting than having multiple completely separate numbers or streets for the same building.

I suppose it is, but to me it came as a bit of a surprise that if I want to send mail to someone in a certain area, I can essentially toss a coin when trying to figure out which city name to use as long as I don’t use certain ones that are discouraged names. I believe my ZIP code has two city names I could use, but I would never use the non-main one because in my mind, that other city is miles away. That struck me, a…

I’m almost positive you can omit city name completely and just include a street address and zip code.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#112

Post by koakuma-chan »

bobthepanda wrote: post #91
layman51 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this idea that a building/property can have more than one address can happen in the United States too. The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1] So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you wo…

There’s also the question of unit numbers and whatnot. In some addressing lookup systems in the US my address is 525 Some Road Unit G; but I have encountered systems that treat it as 525G Some Road.

The unit is usually formatted as either `{building number}-{unit number} {street name}` or `{building number} {street name}, Unit {unit number}`. But both resolve to the same thing.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#113

Post by timewizard »

aethr wrote: post #17

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions. The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an…

> and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

You know who knows this? The tax authority.

> the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Large freight does not work this way. I worked on top of a ski resort for a while. We had a mapped address right where the ski left let out instead of the base of the hill. In the summer you could drive up to it on an ATV easily and a pickup truck if it hadn't recently rained. Somehow a semi truck driver for a freight company got this address and mapped a route to it. We were quite surprised to see the 53' box truck driving up the side of the ski hill.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

The information is encoded elsewhere and it's a bummer there is no incentive to make it as open and widely available as is possible. Although if delivery can rely only on partial information to "complete the next leg" then why can't address lookup do precisely the same thing?

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#114

Post by [deleted] »

cozzyd wrote: post #19

I've noticed some really strange lapses in transit directions as well, though there it might be more directly blamed on the source. Confusingly, for example, Google thinks it sometimes takes like 20 minutes for the metra electric to go from Van Buren to millennium stations (a distance of perhaps half a mile). What I believe is happening is it's using the departure time of the train from millennium station (it will la…

[deleted]

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#115

Post by mastercheif »

I will give credit to the Google Maps team—they handle Queens NYC street address correctly.

Apple Maps drives me nuts—it will only return search results if you include the hyphen in the four digit street address ie: "36-08 33rd St" vs "3608 33rd St". Google will hit on either query.

The hyphen is a part of the "official" address. However, USPS has declared it unnecessary, there's no advantage to using it unless you're navigating by analog map, and it's a PITA to type on a mobile keyboard.

So if anyone on Apple Maps team is here: please fix this. I filled a apple.com/feedback ticket on this years ago.

For anyone interested in the peculiar history of Queens addresses—they convey a cross street and the number of the house ascending going northward.

For example: 36-08 33rd St means that the house is on 33rd St, between 35th and 36th ave, and is house #08 on the block.

https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-res...

That said, Apple Maps is far superior to Google Maps for transit directions, at least in NYC. Google's integration with the MTA is seriously lacking—their directions often do not reflect scheduled changes in routes, let alone real-time issues. That said, Google Maps is superior with POI search and address decoding.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#116

Post by ranger_danger »

aethr wrote: post #17

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions. The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an…

> even within a country there are often many different conventions

Indeed... sometimes USPS even makes up their own "vanity city" names that don't exist. Or mailing addresses might use a different city name than where the house is physically located because of where the post office is physically located.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#117

Post by bobsmooth »

stingraycharles wrote: post #100
reaperman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

Where I currently live, my street has no name, my house has no number. If a package is delivered by mail, my phone number needs to be put on the package, and the local delivery operator calls me to either pick it up, or I send my location through telegram and they deliver it to my house. It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all. The same g…

Have you tried adding delivery instructions? But I guess you couldn't complete an Amazon order without an address.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#118

Post by tangus »

defrost wrote: post #33
reaperman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

I skimmed and I think that's missing That a building|property will have only one address . Sometimes (eg: rural Australia) property addresses are updated from an older numbered lot based system (that goes astray when properties are subdivided and infill houses appear) to a system that numbers houses by driveway distance from last major intersection. For five or ten years a house can be recieving mail or be on the rec…

Besides that, in Buenos Aires, for instance, every access to the street has its own address. A building with 2 entrances (front door and garage) has 2 addresses, etc.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#119

Post by brucedawson »

jonny_eh wrote: post #89
brucedawson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed. If my fixes had been published in the promised 24 hours then this blog post would not have been written but after two weeks this is the best idea I could come up with. I think it is practical for Google M…

> I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed. The friend's cousin did what they could have done themselves, use the feedback tool.

Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced.

So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be determined if that will help or not.

Given that Google Maps understands the rules for street addresses in Vancouver it seems like the problem shouldn't have happened in the first place and should have been auto-corrected and the fix should have been quickly accepted. But none of that happened.

Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#120

Post by at_a_remove »

jwr wrote: post #74

The real problem is that Google Maps isn't regulated like a utility. I know, I know, we all hate regulation, we love free markets, and all. But bear with me for a moment. I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a co…

I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind.

Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.

I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden.

Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like.

It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends.

Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all!

And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road.

Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all.

Road addressing is Fractally Bad.

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