I’m a massive fan of google maps, both the data it presents, and the quality of the interface. But something that has always bugged me is the lack of clear country borders. In places like Europe, I find this a real pain.
The borders are there (in light grey), and it’s better in “terrain” view, but I really want a “political” map, that is designed specifically to show country borders, without all the other guff. Like this.
Presumably, if I was an AJAX / JS ninja, I could make my own app using their API, but it seems like no one else wants this. It also seems like this’d be a very useful feature for Google maps to have…
Actually, as a map designer, I would say that country borders is something Google Maps does rather nicely. Compare how much more readable they are at level 12 than Bing maps, for instance.
Reference maps of this type are always a compromise, and the assumption (based on the origins of the idea in things like Mapquest) probably was that wayfinding and routing was the major use of the map. That means using color to indicate major roads and cities, rather than to color the countries differently. A classic National Geographic paper map, on the other hand, deemphasizes roads.
I also find it a little amusing to describe Google Maps–with its use of local placenames and even local alphabets–as USA-centric.
Google maps is dynamic and designed to show meaningful route information at several zoom levels. Information is dynamically removed at lower zoom levels to avoid everything being on top of everything else. Some information, like borders is shown (if it’s visible) the same way at all zoom levels, while the way roads are displayed changes.
One could change the software so it also created pretty political maps, but that’d cost money, especially if one wanted that too to be dynamic and work at all zoom levels. And even if you opted for only one zoom level it’d still be unlikely to be as pretty as the one linked.
Similar to what others wrote, I think the point is that Google Maps presumes that you like having lots of detail - every town and street that can possibly be crammed into that space and still be readable. When that is done, it is very hard to see the borders. Perhaps this might get solved if there would be a “Less Detail / More Detail” slider control available.
Related complaint: At least they DO show the national borders and state borders. But they don’t show town or county borders at all. And that’s something that I’d find VERY useful.
Municipal borders are extremely difficult to keep up to date. For one thing, you can’t see them on aerial photos or on the ground, so it’s not information that can be collected by the kid driving the Google Streetview car. They’re also tricky to display. They often run down the center of roads and streams, or even worse, down one edge of the right-of-way. So they would require either use of a transparent color on top or some tricky algorithm to offset them out from under the road or river.
County boundaries present some of the same display problems, but Bing does show those at certain levels.
In real life, municipal borders can be hard to notice. In the US, they are sometimes marked, at least on major roads. But sometimes you can be driving in the back country or even your average suburban neighborhood and not realize that you crossed into or out of a City or Town, or crossed the county line. Depending on how old the jurisdictions are, the border line may not relate to the actual infrastructure, such as streets and buildings, so you might have a case where your next door neighbor lives in a congruent suburban house in the same neighborhood as you, but in a different town than you and they pay taxes to and get fire and police service from that other town.
This also applies to state boundaries. There are areas in Washington, DC that you can drive around and not realize that you just drove into Maryland.
Yeah, bingo!
Also it would be great to have each country different transparent color. And one thing of “Guff’s” would be healthy is relief. Since political map becomes more clearly when you estimate where are mountains separate countries either seas and oceans! And also I’would add a “Time-wheel”!!! Rotated with, and everything changes as it was! Some states appear and some end. Geography and History lessons at the same time!
There’s always Google Earth for your more advanced mapping needs. Relief, border highlights, county layers, etc. are all available. And it’s free.
Maps is quick reference for directions. Earth lets you do more data-crunching.
Or you can do even more stuff with free geospatial software like QGIS. You want a four-colored map of Europe with transparent colors on top of a Google relief map? You can make it happen.
That’s one of the things which reveals its American origins (although it is something which could be, say, Australian): it’s shit at dealing with multiple languages.
My “street”* has two names; Google maps shows half of it as having its Spanish name and the other half as having its Basque name. Yes, this has to do with the databases they received… but those databases sure weren’t designed by someone who had ever lived in a multilingual culture. The people filling them in are having to deal with what they got. They can’t “just design their own database” because then Google, Tomtom et al won’t accept it.
Like I said, this isn’t really American-only, it’s monolingual: I’ve had people tell me of their problems dealing with multilingual regions and, when I asked whether everybody in their team was “from Madrid”, they answered “oh, no, I’m from Asturias, another one from Soria…” “in linguistic terms, from Madrid. Something that’s daily life to me, to a gallego, a mallorquín or someone from Belgium, is completely alien to you guys.”
Not really a street, but it gets listed as one because it’s a kind of entity that cartography databases do not have among their possibilities. The name given by those databases is akin to “Mercy Square Street” if squares weren’t in the list of possibilities.
The resolution of national borders is still pretty poor in many areas on Google Maps - e.g. where the border actually follows a river or stream, the line on the map is often only a rough approximation: Example.
Ouch. Well, at least GoogleMaps is doing a better job at getting its highway vector files to match the actual location of highways (as seen in satellite/air photo views). Up until recently, this was terrible, for things like even major highways in Mexico, say.
Ha, that is a crazy looking border. I’m imagining Slovenia and Croatia agreeing on River Xyz as the border. Then Slovenia goes out and sneakily digs a looping channel off the river, cutting off a portion of Croatia and claiming it for herself. Then Croatia starts doing the same thing in retaliation, etc.
I realize the real reason is probably that sometime in the past the meandering border river was channeled and straightened for reasons of commerce, but the original river bed was kept as the border.
