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Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

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Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#301

Post by londons_explore »

Triv888 wrote: post #187
drdavid wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, they'll send you down logging roads and old, disused roads fit only for 4WD trucks. It's not just Google. Other GPS maps will send you to my house on a road that hasn't really been passable for 30 or 40 years - if you make the mistake of not telling it to avoid dirt roads. But, if you tell it to stick to paved roads, it'll have you park about 2 km away. I have no idea how to fix this, except to suggest…

Google tracks all Android phones all the time, they should be able to see that no one uses that road, they just don't care.

Google doesn't use Android phone location data as effectively as they could for privacy reasons. Tracking people's location in aggregate to make decisions about which roads are usable at which speeds is okay, but as soon as you get to the levels of "only one guy went along this road in 2020, should we mark it as private", it becomes a privacy issue.

It's a privacy issue to use that kind of data, because the employees who build the map shouldn't be looking at one guys GPS traces. So instead the traces are cut into tiny chunks and aggregated and only shown where there are more than 50 people at the same spot. That effectively means there is no data available to make decisions on the most rarely used roads.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#302

Post by rstarast »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #10
random5634 wrote: post #3

Here's a link with an image of the highway of bones: https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-12-23/perdidos-en-la-t... Here is a video of a drive along it between the cities mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J46vglp6g98 Insane cold in this area - I'd be curious what type of preparation they had for this, and why not turn back if things were impassable? Google in the USA maps lots of roads that a…

From this link posted in another comment it says "The two travelers - not dressed for extreme cold - evidently took a wrong turn and their car got damaged". So it does not seem to be because google suggested the incorrect route. https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/tragedy-in-yakut... Edit: It was pointed out in the comments below that Google maps does go on the correct route now. It is the same general road,…

For what it's worth, OpenStreetMap has a section of it as a "track" with "very_horrible" smoothness, but openrouteservice routes that way anyway: https://maps.openrouteservice.org/directions?n1=61.559148&n2...

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#303

Post by londons_explore »

mark-r wrote: post #211
s0rce wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US its pretty easy to submit corrections. I've submitted a few corrections on US public lands but now I usually don't bother and just update open street map instead.

I once submitted a correction for the exact location of a public park. The correction looked like it was applied, but when I looked later it had been reverted.

The data pipelines for maps can be very long - certain changes might take 6 months or more to be applied, because the computation required to rebuild certain things is massive, and it isn't worth doing simply because some street edge moved by a few centimeters.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#304

Post by ficklepickle »

voisin wrote: post #71
hirundo wrote: post #34

Travelling from Durango Colorado to Reserve New Mexico, Google Maps routed me to a "road" that was simply a dry stream bed, in the middle of Navajo Nation, in high desert wilderness, many miles from human habitation. It happened gradually. First I was directed to a well maintained gravel road, then to dirt track, which forked and forked and slowly faded to nothing. I was driving a 4x4, had an almost full tank, a load…

Same thing happened to me in the B.C. interior north of Kamloops. I stopped when the “road” became a dry stream bed blocked by a cow that seemed as confused as I was by my presence in that particular place.

Don't see Kamloops here everyday. I just helped my brother move from there last week.

I don't know if BC's forest service roads are thoroughly electronically mapped anywhere. Last I knew of, you had to buy a book.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#305

Post by londons_explore »

rz2k wrote: post #157
slickrick216 wrote: post #126

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for…

Have you tried looking at Open Street Maps? If your county's GIS and OSM both exclude their driveway, it might be easier to get Google to update. In my area, it sees like some of the driveways have turned into roads because of overly helpful contributors.

Google won't look in OSM... All kinds of legal hurdles there...

They can look in some government maps, depending on the licenses.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#306

Post by ficklepickle »

mayneack wrote: post #217
hirundo wrote: post #34

Travelling from Durango Colorado to Reserve New Mexico, Google Maps routed me to a "road" that was simply a dry stream bed, in the middle of Navajo Nation, in high desert wilderness, many miles from human habitation. It happened gradually. First I was directed to a well maintained gravel road, then to dirt track, which forked and forked and slowly faded to nothing. I was driving a 4x4, had an almost full tank, a load…

I had a very similar experience in NW New Mexico. I expect to go off pavement for this sort of thing, but eventually we faded into what was very uneven dirt. Luckily we could tell someone had come that way in the last day because of an inch or so of fresh snow, so we made it through successfully to the destination where everything was well maintained. We went out the more common route south, but it wasn't that much b…

Ah yes, there are tire tracks, so either this road is passable or we are about to find a body.

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#307

Post by boudin »

Last summer, in France, google maps tried to have me driving in hiking path in woods as a "shortcut" apparently. At one point it was even trying to have me to take a turn in trees directly, didn't look there was ever a path there.

Never used google maps for maps since, it's way too unreliable. The only use i have for it is to get business opening hours

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#308

Post by echelon »

akiselev wrote: post #139
kzrdude wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of insane that there's still a gap there.

It's not insane, it's rather on purpose. In the 1970s there was a huge concern that if proper infrastructure was built, it would cause foot and mouth disease to make its way from South to Central and North America, which stopped the USA's attempt to built a road across it. Within a decade, Panama turned much of the area into the Darien National Park and the UN classified it as a biosphere reserve & world heritage sit…

> In the 1970s there was a huge concern that if proper infrastructure was built, it would cause foot and mouth disease to make its way from South to Central and North America

That's fascinating!

Wikipedia shows that the disease is nearly eradicated in South America:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-and-mouth_disease

I suppose there still wouldn't be an economic incentive to build a road when there are two large bodies of water on either side?

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#309

Post by fock »

noja wrote: post #297
slickrick216 wrote: post #126

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for…

If you want a solution for this today: put up a sign, with a google maps logo on it saying "wrong way" in big letters, below it explain that google have wrongly marked this trail as a road.

they'll have a hard time, keeping up with the changing logo!

Re: Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road

#310

Post by cerved »

ITT, lot's of anecdotal stories about people using map services and driving down crappy roads in the middle of nowhere. Here's some aggregated data to provide context on how road networks are composed and the changes they go through.

The road network in Sweden is comprised of 36 million+ distinct coordinates that form 3 million+ roads which are joined on 2.4 million+ nodes.

In the first half of 2020, 16 thousand+ class (funktionell vägklass) 9 roads were added to the network, consisting of 2,769 km of road. Class 9 roads are the highest classification of roads in the Swedish road network and is loosely defined as "where vehicle traffic normally doesn't occur but is totally possible". Class 9 roads compromise 38.2% of all road links in the Swedish road-network for vehicles.

This represents the lions share (64.22% number of road links, 75.33% km of road link) of the changes in the road network during the first half of 2020.

This data originates from the NVDB service of the Swedish traffic agency and can be viewed here on a map: https://nvdb2012.trafikverket.se/SeTransportnatverket

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