Just booked my winter jaunt to Cozumel and thought I’d pull it up on Google Maps.
Apparently, there are no roads in Mexico at all which is probably why I’m flying! Hopefully I do not have to hoof-it to the resort.
Why does Google Maps not show any roads in Mexico?
Presumably 'cos they can’t be bothered to pay for the mapping data for such a little-visited and remote-from-the-USA country.
You’re kidding, verdad?
Does Google Earth have Mexican road data?
I’m thinking he must be! I mean I live all the way up in NY so don’t get much chance to visit but I know people who live close to the border to drive across, often. It’s a bit odd that Google leaves it out. I would think the streets of London are equally complicated!
If I’m allowed a slight hijack. Lately when I’ve tried to use Google Earth when I try to zoom in, the screen turns a brown like color with no imagery. Anyone know if it is my computer or is this a common probelem with the program?
Sometimes Google Earth has road data, but only at certain zoom amounts, but not nearly at the same detail as much of the rest of the world.
I know the data exists; I had a AAA Maps CD back in 1999 that had Mexican roads, but more recent versions of many, many maps programs still omit them.
Er, sí 
What is weird, though, is that I was looking at Google Maps for Kenya just yesterday, and there is plenty of road data for Africa. Having said that, when you zoom in in hybrid view, the maps appear to bear very little relation to what’s on the ground!
Google gets its map data from other providers. These other providers are collecting digital road map data from all over the world, but it takes a while, and in some countries it happens faster than others. Also, Google has to pay for this data, and they may not think it worthwhile to pay for data in some countries until the quality is of a certain standard, or until there are enough people who want to see that data.
Ed
I don’t use Google maps, but I have Google Earth on my computer at home. I have used it down to “neighborhood” level with street names in Mexico before, but not recently.
CBEscapee, Google Earth has clear shots of some places, and blurry shots of others. Try (if you haven’t already) some different places and see if there’s a difference. I remember trying to view Sydney, Australia and half the friggen city…including the harbor…was blurry. I think they are adding new media, Sydney might be clearer now. Also, check to see if the “Streaming” tag near the bottom of the view is at 100%. If it hangs at less than 100%, the view will be blurry.
I see. I would think people in Mexico would find it useful. Maybe they all take the bus.
I prefer www.live.com for aerial photos. Thay have many from just a few hundred feet taken at oblique (probably not the correct term) angles.
And now there are none. The roads appear to be yellow lines, but they diappear when the zoom gets tight and are not numbered. The street names are all gone.
Way to take a step backwards.
Wow! The interface sucks, the pages are ugly, and the zoom-in/zoom-out makes me nauseous, but by golly they have street level maps of Mexico!
A quick check of three areas that I know quite well:
Leon: all of the streets that I could think of to check are there, although the highlighting for some of them is confusing. Google maps has a lot higher resolution for hybrid mode, though. As you’ll see, this is the clear winner using Live.
Hermosillo: same low resolution as Leon when compared to Google. At least most of the major roads are there. For some reason it won’t let me zoom in closer for the roads, and it won’t draw sections of the map on the south side of town (in just map mode). Roads are horribly out date – the entire section of the city I lived in was missing, and the whole area was built just before the '94 bust, so plenty of time to update records.
Manzanillo: same crappy resolution, and the only roads are the big arteries.
(I’m testing using FireFox on a Mac, so there’s a possibility that Live is intentionally not playing nicely with my non-MS, non-MSIE setup).
I’m sure they would find it useful, but are there enough Google users in Mexico, and are there enough of them that are receptive to Google’s ads, which pay Google’s bills? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m sure Google does. And digital road map data is expensive.
Ed
I just checked out my house on that site and Google Maps has a much clearer view, not to mention the live.com image is from several years ago (before Hurricane Katrina when I had about 20 trees completely hiding my house from the aerial photos).
The aerial imagery for my house has gone backwards. There was an update recently (I can tell from the shape and trim of the trees) but it is much lower resolution than before.
Central Sydney has some of the highest resolution imagery on Google Maps now. Google Maps
I was going to post and say that Google Maps was also showing pre-Katrina pictures for the Gulf Coast (they did a month ago, anyway), but I see that the post-Katrina pics are back up. They still appear to be showing pre-Katrina New Orleans, however.
There are a lot of countries in the world for which Google Maps does not have road data shown at all. Presumably these are places where the data has not been purchased, or the rights to the data are in dispute. The data may be regulated by the governments in question. I find it a bit amazing that the only data for South and Central America appears to be from Brazil, while much of Africa has something shown, regardless of how inaccurate it may be. 
Yahoo Maps, for what it is worth, has even less road data about the world. Africa and South America and Asia are all unroaded. :dubious:
It’s not even necessarily an issue of whether the data has been purchased. There are still many countries in which digital road map data has not even been collected yet. (And by digital road map data, I mean data good enough to pinpoint an address on, or to give directions by.) It’s a slow, ongoing process steadily making progress around the world.
Ed
But I’m almost certain Google Earth had Mexican road information at one time. I could be mistaken, I might have been using some other app at the time (like I said, it’s been a while ago), but I sure thought it was Google Earth. At any rate, some app had Mexican road information, and street names down to neighborhood levels, this much I am sure of.