(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively)
I was driving around Vernon, BC a few weeks ago and I asked Google Maps for directions to 3207 30th Ave. It confidently told me where to go but luckily my passenger noticed that it was actually directing me to 3207 34th Ave, four blocks north. Well that’s odd.
A few days later my cousin asked me (as the ex-Google still-nerd member of the family) if I could help with a Google Maps issue. The problem was that the address 138 W 6th Ave in Vancouver was being mapped at a location 2.4 km (that’s 1.5 miles or 123 furlongs) away from the actual location.
I could visualize the absurdity of where it maps the W 6th Ave address by asking Google Maps for directions between 136 W 6th Ave and 138 W 6th Ave. These addresses are adjacent in real life, but Google Maps gave me this:
That’s a long walk to get to the building next door.
There’s another fun way to visualize this bug. Search for “Clark & Page Casting Studios” in Google Maps. Then copy its address, shown in Google Maps, to the clipboard and ask for directions to Clark & Page Casting Studios from its address. This should be a zero-meter walk, but of course it isn’t. Instead it is, no surprise, a 2.4 km walk from Clark & Page Casting Studios to its address. Fun!
Or this silliness. If you navigate from “138 W 6th Ave Unit 1B” to “138 W 6th Ave #2b” then it is, you guessed it, a 2.4 km walk.
This error was pointed out to me because apparently aspiring actors kept going to the wrong place and being late for their auditions. These mistakes have real-world consequences.
There are more
Finding one error is curious, but two suggests a pattern. I started browsing Google Maps looking for addresses that seemed out of place. I quickly found three more.
1951 W 19th Ave in Vancouver is mapped at a 2.1 km walk from where its address should logically be. It should be in the 1900 block of W 19th Ave but is instead placed ten blocks away by Google Maps:
1355 W 17th Ave, North Vancouver is a particularly odd case because it is mapped as being in the wrong city (in Vancouver instead of North Vancouver), but on the right street (W 17th Ave) but in the wrong block (the 900 block instead of the 1300 block). As it turns out W 17th Ave doesn’t actually exist in North Vancouver. What is going on?
Typos? Street View?
The answer might be typos. 138 W 6th Ave is being mapped at the location where I would expect to find 1038 W 16th Ave located – a pair of single-digit errors. This requires that somebody/something made two errors when entering the address for 1038 W 16th Ave. The problem with this explanation is that 1038 W 16th Ave doesn’t exist – I cycled over there to check and the addresses go straight from 1
30 Comments
brucedawson
Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading to real-life consequences.
After two weeks of failing to fix the most significant error that I found I decided to blog about the issue in hopes of getting the attention of the Google Maps team, and also to share what I found.
7e
Google Maps has declined remarkably two or three years. It’s now an ML-brained mess. Like the rest of Google. Apple Maps is actually better now! That’s incredible.
bombcar
I wonder if trying to support strange international address styles (like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued, not ordinal from a center point) and/or trying to scan imagery for addresses is confusing it.
The fact it gets the street wrong indicates a tokenization issue somewhere.
Any evidence it happens to non-numeric streets like Main Street or Martin Luther Blvd, or is it only 10th st types of things?
sleepy_keita
Adresses are notoriously hard, and it varies from country to country, and even within countries. I've been working on Japanese address data, and while you may be able to trust Google with an address in the city, there's a large probability that it'll send you somewhere else (sometimes > 10km) in rural areas.
precommunicator
If you directly use Google Maps Geocoding API you will see in response there what type of address is it and is it precise location or estimation.
rs186
Not sure it's related, but recently I tried to ask Google maps to find a way to a train station, and it confidently set the destination to the exit of a nearby highway. Yes, I double checked that I was using driving navigation, and it expected me to stop the car in the middle of the traffic.
And I have no idea what to do about this.
P.S. I never had good experience with reporting errors. Sometimes they are rejected despite absolutely being correct, or they end up having no effect at all.
xnx
Hmm. I saw the behavior you describe, but I also got the expected directions: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpVHhPf1U9Ytu6U86
ForOldHack
Google maps knows nothing but what the programmers tell it. It's not self aware yet. The engineers, using Google colored bikes rely on a broken street system in Palo Alto. I rode a bike around the campus wiping Macintoshes.
aethr
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 item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.
Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.
cozzyd
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 layover for 15 minutes or so, presumably) as the arrival time.
standardUser
I'm shocked at how bad Google handles street addresses in Europe and Latin America. I'll concede that some regions have bizzaro numbering conventions, but Google Maps has been around a long time now and those formats have stayed the same. If anything, the situation seems even worse on recent trips.
kccqzy
If the author can use the Google Maps feedback tool to get the errors fixed, I'm pretty sure somewhere on the internet someone with malice can also use the same feedback tool to place the address at the wrong location. The only safeguard is probably a low-paid contractor in India reviewing these manual suggestions.
One year ago the Elizabeth line disappeared from the maps in London. There are many Reddit posts about this such as https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/… and https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/…. I asked a friend who worked at Google and they said that it was because some poor workers in India accidentally hid it while fixing something else.
williamscales
Google _could_ cross reference home addresses and home locations from phones with Google Maps.
They don’t need to understand how addresses work, just trust that most users have put in their home address correctly.
If we’re going to have all our data siphoned up and aggregated it would be nice if there were some useful side benefits.
pianom4n
"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.
MattSteelblade
In my case, at least Google Maps knows the city where I live. Apple Maps has my whole neighborhood in a nearby city.
486sx33
Seems like Vancouver is the problem
paulmooreparks
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 buildings (HDB blocks) to get anywhere on foot here. I typically just use the walking directions to get a bearing, point the compass pointer toward the destination, and start walking in as nearly a straight line as I can, ignoring the circuitous path Maps suggests.
Driving directions on the expressways here are also spotty. If I wait for Maps to tell me to exit the expressway, I'm already at or past the exit. I basically have to already kind of know where I'm going to make use of driving directions (you know, like we used to do with paper maps). Never mind that there are actual bugs in the directions: at one spot on the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE), if I need to exit onto the MCE, it tells me to exit onto the AYE, which is incorrect).
Still, I guess it's better than nothing.
Calwestjobs
Use Google Plus Codes OR Irish Eircode. street addresses are nonsensical prehistoric waste of database space.
trollbridge
Google Maps decided my driveway is a road, and also gave it a (non-existent) name. I have attempted to update this information, but Google just rejects my suggestions as "not accepted".
So we now regularly get people driving down here or trying to park, when it's actually just a one-lane driveway.
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.
jwr
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 course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps.
The problem is that at this point Google Maps is so ubiquitous that people accept it as "truth". And that is a problem when it shows an incorrect location: people can't get to your place, package deliveries are delayed, etc.
Unfortunately, things that are so ubiquitous in our lives require regulation — at the very least, Google should be required to process (and verify) requests for corrections in a timely manner.
al2o3cr
My favorite address WTF (from when I worked at a startup that managed deliveries) was an apartment building in New York City. If you tried to geocode the full address of an individual apartment (123 Someplace St Unit 789, etc) it would fail – but an address without the unit would succeed!
This was particularly weird because normally the geocoder was fine with bogus unit numbers (eg on obvious single-family homes) but fell over in just this one case…
raylad
I feel like Google Maps experienced a serious regression a few months ago.
Before that, it would give reasonable mass transit directions in San Francisco. After that, it would always use a bus to go even 1 block to BART, giving drastically inflated transit times.
monktastic1
Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact).
Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).
graywh
can they at least fix the interstate highway exits it thinks are splits? why do I need to be told to keep left at random exits?
KnuthIsGod
Dunning-Kruger effect on full display.
Should be "the writer of this article has no idea how street addresses actually work in the real world".
sublinear
> that’s 1.5 miles or 123 furlongs
Surely that's a typo and supposed to be 12.3 furlongs? Even that might be slightly incorrect.
nitwit005
This seems like an optimist, imagining an ordered world, which sadly does not exist.
Whatever assumption you think will always hold true for addresses, will not in practice. Even in places that appear strictly patterned.
The suggestion to guess addresses that "should exist" is just clearly wrong. If someone buys two plots of land and builds a larger building, an address normally vanishes.
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.
TrianguloY
On my city there are a couple tram stops that were moved a decade or so ago. Google maps still show them at the old locations. All the comments say this, all the photos show this, even street view show it! But any time I send a change request it is rejected.
I've always wondered who reviews the requests, if you are a local, or even spend 2 minutes checking, you'll notice the mistake…