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Street address errors in Google Maps

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Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#61

Post by paulmooreparks »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #55

Google does have a nearly impossible task making Maps work around the world, and I think it does an admirable job. One just has to have a bit of local knowledge to work around the quirks. For example, the walking directions Maps gives for Singapore are usually ridiculous. They're almost always twice the distance they need to be, since it's very common to cut through the open lower floor (void deck) of apartment build…

And another one I just thought of: If I ask for driving directions to a mall or office building (here in Singapore, anyway), it nearly always sends me to the taxi drop-off, not the entrance to the carpark. I have to drop a pin on the carpark entrance (which presumes that I know where it is) to get sane directions. Otherwise, I end up on the wrong side of the building in gridlocked traffic trying to find the carpark.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#62

Post by misswaterfairy »

echoangle wrote: post #38
Loughla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps also includes towns in rural areas that don't exist. There are 4 listed within 20 miles of my house that haven't existed for well over 100 years. They're not incorporated anymore, and they don't exist on any other maps, just Google. It's weird.

Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement

Map Men have a fun take on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI

(Their whole series is brilliant too!)

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#63

Post by misswaterfairy »

I deal with addresses as part of my day job.

The only consistent thing about addresses is that they're really not that consistent...

It's not only Google that has this issue; but the nature of addressing in general. It's not uncommon for the geocoders we use to be hundreds of metres off of the actual location of the address.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#64

Post by MBCook »

makeitdouble wrote: post #43
defrost wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)

Or they were multiple adjacent spaces in, say, a strip mall that later merged into one larger business.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#65

Post by mayneack »

pianom4n wrote: post #36

"Is the parcel in the geographical bounds of the city name entered?" The "city name" on an address isn't really a "city". SFO's address is "San Francisco, CA", but is not within SF city limits. Queens NY addresses have "cities" that are just neighborhoods. Applying any kind of logic to addresses will just be a minefield.

In much of unincorporated america, the most valid form of an address just uses the nearest city regardless of boundaries. Almost nowhere actually guarantees that every bit of land is even in a city limits. At the margins, addresses are unstructured free form text that is correct if it can be interpreted by a human with local knowledge.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#66

Post by brucedawson »

mcooley wrote: post #29
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…

I worked on a global consumer mapping app once. Among that team, the idea that address schemes were too inconsistent to be useful was also conventional wisdom.

And yet, as I mention in the blog post, Google Maps actually does understand how Vancouver's addresses work. It can find the location where a non-existent address would be if it existed. But for addresses like 138 W 6th Ave it chooses not to, instead trusting... well, I don't know what it's trusting. But whatever it is trusting is wrong, and is resistant to being corrected through the feedback tool.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#67

Post by layman51 »

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…

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 would see that they recommend using the city name of “Houston” for mail, but they would also recognize “West University Place”. There’s also a city called “Southside Place” which should be avoided when it comes to sending mail. But then that kind of makes me think that if a house is within the limits of one or these small cities, then it could in theory have the same street name but have two different city values in different databases.

Then on the other hand there’s a somewhat related problem where a small town or village (e.g. Somers, WI and Scotland, CT) can have multiple ZIP codes and that ends up causing a lot of headaches for the residents of the town since they all might live nearby but then each section of the town might end up associated with some other larger city it’s closest to.

[1]: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#68

Post by ajsnigrutin »

criddell wrote: post #45
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…

> it’s probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some. Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.

Wait what?

I live in a small country of ~2mio pop, and we have approximately 6000 settlements with streets and street addresses and many different standards of numberings, depending on many reason, mostly historic.

Technically yes, a few thousand systems could be programmed into some google processing engine, but you'd have to manually classify every road to set the correct system, and even there, you'd never know what is a legit numbering scheme or what is an error.

For example, Cucumber street 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 on one side of the street and Cucumber street 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 on the other is a valid numbering scheme. If #3 splits his front yard and builds another house, you'd get "3a" on that side. If #6 buys #8, demolishes one or both buildings and builds a bigger one, that could become either a "6" or an "8", and the other would be missing. Then #7 is demolished and an apartment building is built there with 4 entrances to 4 separate building sections, so those would be numbered 7a, 7b, 7c and 7d, even though they're in the same building. #5, #7 and #9 are also a part of the same building (three entrances), but the building is older, the street was renamed and renumbered some time after, and each of the entrances got its own number. Then you come to #10, which is also a building with 4 entrances, but #10 goes towards Cucumber street, and the other three are facing the Lettuce street and are thus Lettuce street 6, 6a and 6b. Notice starting with the "6" here and "7a" above, well, that's because #6 lettuce street existed before the building was expanded, it kept the #6 number, but since there used to be a shed on Cucumber street #7, the new building starts with 7a.

Good luck writing a general model for that.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#69

Post by nightfly »

layman51 wrote: post #67
defrost wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Also: I live on sevenmile hill Rd. Google thinks it's 7 mile hill Rd, and others sometimes call it seven mile hill rd
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