They do put a lot of “access roads” that are not open to the public.
My new favorite is google maps telling me a route is shorter but it tells me it’s a toll road. But in reality, it’s a ferry across a river that’s only available certain hours during part of the year.
The reason we often have to tell visitors to not trust Google when trying to reach us, is that it often takes them into a really steep valley that is densely vegetated with prickly plants on both sides on the road, with water accumulated at the bottom in the winter and really large and long holes from the water running down the hills. If they don’t get the hint that maybe google isn’t always giving the best suggestion they risk getting stuck or having their car damaged.
At least with open street map, you can login to openstreetmap.org/edit and mark the bad road as private/gated or even delete it entirely. I did it on a bad road segment in my neighborhood and ride-sharing drivers no longer made wrong turns there (Grab apparently uses OSM instead of Google Maps data).
You can actually do this with Google maps too. It can take time for them to actually make changes though
We had this same problem and did just this. 3 years later still no changes. Until my dad happened to be complaining about it at a party and was introduced to a friend of a friend that worked at Google with the maps team. Was finally fixed a week later. So yea a path exists but 3 years is a long time to wait for a simple fix.
I swear they use the Maps Contributor ratings to determine how quickly they make changes.
I’ve not had any issues getting changes made in a timely manner when I suggest them because I’ve left a bunch of reviews and photos for places I’ve visited.
If you never leave reviews or photos, they probably don’t trust your suggestions. That’s just my guess though.
All my legitimate submissions sit forever unacceped, but they were very quick to accept my submission of a landmark location on my old trailer as a “Palace”. Only recently noticed they removed it after years of saying Pleasant Valley Palace was a landmark in the middle of a trailer park, lol.
How? Every single adress is wrong on google for the whole muncipiality since they standarized the road numbering 3 years ago.
Crowdsourcing is nice but I’m not happy about the “don’t mark temporary hindrances” thing in OSM, some of them last for months and I can’t warn others. Sometimes I even forget the hindrance myself and feel real unsmart dumb.
That seems like a tricky one to moderate. I’m sure they are worried about things being set and forgotten and never repealed.
I understand why, but I also have examples of compromises;
- Set a marker, it expires after a certain timeperiod. Users “validate” that the hindrance is still there, resetting the timer.
- Set a marker, “Hindrance here at 2023-11-03”
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- “Expected end”
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- Today
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- This week
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- This month
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- Later (Marked hindrance disappear some time after “Expected end” if no users validate that it’s still there, with new “Expected end”.
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Just some thoughts.
Google might be wrong, or a farmer might be trying to prevent people from using what is legally a public footpath. They sometimes buy the land and then want to take away legal public access to it.
For example: https://fix.bromley.gov.uk/report/3122960
Or https://www.eveshamjournal.co.uk/news/23063746.frances-payne-blocked-footpath-set-appear-court/
You can also submit corrections to Google maps. If they won’t correct it, there may be a reason. (Not to say which side of a dispute is right.)
Google maps doesn’t correct shit. I’ve tried multiple times to get a nonexistent road (literally, i took geotagged photos showing this “road” is untouched brushland) that cuts through my parent’s place removed, and they never responded or did anything about it.
It took YEARS for me to get Google Maps to correct the location of a local bus stop. It showed up on the wrong street, which screwed up walking directions. They finally fixed it when I submitted a photo of the bus stop along with my report, even though it’s exactly what you see if you check the recently updated street view in the exact location I had been submitting error reports. 🤷♂️
How do you do that? A few streets in my parents’ town are not up to date. In 2021, the views changed to what it was in 2012. But only for like 3 streets.
In the android app you can just hold on a part of the map and pull the menu up and tap “report a problem”.
This is a true general statement about the existence of Google.
“when there’s a sign, there’s history”
