Hi,
In the absence of an official Google Map legend, I wonder if anyone on the dope knows what the little “1”'s mean in the map interface?
Image link below.
Street numbers.
Huh?
It occurred to me that it might be where the street started numbering houses from, but I don’t think it is. Most of the 1s seem to be more or less in the middle of streets.
Yeah, it’s curious. I would have thought that, too, but it seems to be in the middle of the road, and the UK doesn’t really number streets that way. For those interested, this is Lincoln, UK.
Not house numbers. In the UK it would be very rare for 1 to not be at the beginning of where the street changes to a new name, or the end closest to the city center.
I think it’s some sort of database anomaly, perhaps segments that the local GIS technician for some reason wanted to differentiate from other segments with the same name. Somehow those have found their way into Google’s map database.
It’s worth mentioning that there are lots of other online maps besides Google: Bing, OpenStreetMap, NokiaMaps, ViaMichelin, and ArcGIS Online. For the UK, there’s even OS maps online at streetmap.co.uk
Could it be a one-lane, two-way road?
If you go into Street View, those marked “1” are all pretty narrow roads, but maybe that’s just how that country is… not sure.
The 1s are in the same style and position as road numbers (not house numbers), as in the real A15 and B1308 on that map. My guess is that the database had “1” as a placeholder for the road number, and it wasn’t removed for these ones. (The roads in question appear to be too small to be classified A or B roads.)
But the A15 and B1308 also have 1’s. More likely that they erroneously appeared in an “alternate name” field in the database.
No one outside Google Geo really knows how Google cobbles together geodata. They buy lots of it from local governments, they seem to now collect a fair amount using the Street View cars, and they take crowdsource comments. In the US there have been a lot of problems this year with “alternate names” for US highways. Labels such as “US 20 in Idaho” will appear on US 20 in Ohio, or a portion of Joliet Rd. near Chicago will be labeled “Foothills Blvd.” What’s the common thread? Both were once segments of US 66. So I smell some sort of relational database issue.