I reported an error to MapQuest that was never corrected either. I submitted a scan of the relevant official town plan and a photograph of the street sign. That was about three years ago.
Google corrected it. I never reported it to them, but I saw the same error and assumed they used the same source. I don’t know whe the correction was made on Google, but the funny thing about that, is that they corrected the one error and put in a different one.
This is what it’s like: ______ | ________|
The red is a street called Sesame St. and it stops at a North/South running street called Hill Street, across Hill (black) there is another L shaped street called Wisteria Lane (blue). Sesame and Wisteria are not in line with each other either, they are offest a bit.
In any case, MapQuest and Google had both streets (red and blue) listed as Sesame Street as if Sesame continued across Hill. Presently, Google has made a correction, and Wisteria is now correctly labelled “Wisteria”.
However, Sesame St. has inexplicably been changed to “Broadway”.
*Note: All streets changed to protect the location of the Bat Cave.
I’ve used Mapquest a hundred times or more and Google Maps quite a bit recently, and neither has ever led me astray. I live in the Chicago area but this have used Google Maps as my GPS via iPad on two vacations this year. On the most recent vacation, someone else had a Garmin but it was not as accurate or complete as Google Maps.
Thomas Guides actually puts in very minor errors deliberately. They use this as a means of establishing intellectual theft when someone copies their maps for commercial gain.
The main errors in my part of the world (England) are, as others have found, the locations of businesses. I think a lot of them are submitted by Google users, and there seems to be very little quality control, if any. Oddly, some of them are listed as “confirmed locations” that have supposedly been verified by the businesses themselves!
There’s also one “phantom street” in my small town, which doesn’t exist on the ground and never has. I don’t know if it’s a copyright trap, or if it was a planned street that was never built (I doubt this, as it’s at the end of a cul-de-sac).
Most of the problems I notice are where the map is out of date, rather than wrong. There were some new streets in my subdivision that didn’t show up. That was easy to document, since the streets were visible on the plat map. They fixed that in a month or 2.
I also sent them a report about the Maitland Blvd. Expressway extension and send them a link to the Expressway authority website and the updated map. It took a few months more for that. I have no proof in either case that my reports caused the update, but they did acknowledge them.
YMMV, but I’ve found that my county board of elections often has the most up to date maps online. Of course they need current information about new streets so people are assigned to the correct precinct. They had my street for a year before anyone else showed it online.
The county is widening the street in front of my subdivision. I wonder how before the Google Street View car comes down and updates the view? For that matter, how long before the Google bike show up and photographs the West Orange Trail?
I’ve reported dozens of errors to Google Maps, but they haven’t fixed many of them. I’ll get an e-mail saying “We checked, and you’re right! We’ll fix the problem,” but then months later it will still be incorrect. Other times, they claim they can’t fix it. There was an interchange here in Madison that was rebuilt last year, and I submitted a problem report describing the changes and linking to the PDF plans for the interchange from WisDOT, but they wouldn’t fix it.
I sometimes wish Google would just farm out the corrections. I can draw Bezier curves, and I could probably fix dozens of errors an hour for a small price. Google could set up a system where people could log in and get paid a small amount to fix their backlog of errors. They’d probably clear out their backlog in a matter of months.
With Android phones, people are using Google maps for their GPS systems. I suspect they need actual measured waypoints to fix their maps and not drawings. An aerial photo might be good enough, since you could overlay it on the existing map and figure out the coordinate for the new streets, but I could be wrong.