12/9/12 9:44 PM

Natural selection at work? This made the national news over here - according to a police report I heard this morning, a couple of iDiots who slavishly followed the Apple maps route to Mildura became bogged on 4WD tracks in the national park with no water and no mobile phone signal to call for help - and the temperature there at the end of last month set a record for November at 46C.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/10/australian_police_say_dont_use_ios_maps_after_drivers_led_into_desert/

12/9/12 10:09 PM

Opps...

12/10/12 6:12 AM

...OOPs?

12/10/12 7:33 PM

I hear there are more problems on iMaps than Google maps but despite my reporting them, Google maps in our area (bicycle option) routes you off a low-traffic paved state highway onto a two-track under a power line. They also route you off low traffic paved county roads and onto gravel roads. I realize that the bicycle route mapping is "beta" but they seem to have some rather arbitrary algorithms that take you off pavement and onto gravel for no perceivable reason.

12/10/12 8:10 PM

Oppps I do mean Oops.

;O

12/11/12 8:38 AM

Yeah, this still sucks. I took a trip to a known destination via a new route this past weekend with lots of (well, for me ) fun climbing. As I approached the top I noticed that Google had me take a 1/2 mile detour (the south and west sides of a rectangle) that saved no time and no climbing (and all of the roads in this section were pretty much the same). It also had me take a couple of swings of like 250' that merely complicated matters. Feh.

I think I'll stick to printing out the maps and inking in my preferred routes.

With a fountain pen (he said, at the risk of starting yet another seriously OT thread).

12/11/12 9:35 AM

I think suggesting routes that are not the best choice is typical of navigators and map sites in general.

The Garmin I have in my car will always get me where I'm going but sometimes by a route i wouldn't choose if i know the area well.

12/11/12 10:56 AM

"Google Maps Bike Option "

Only as good as the data ?

The Google Maps Bike maps here are good to the extreme IMO. But all things bike are I guess. Funny that this fact was not really on my Portland pluses list beyond hearing and reading it. LOL

12/11/12 2:06 PM

quote:

---

I hear there are more problems on iMaps than Google maps but despite my reporting them, Google maps in our area (bicycle option) routes you off a low-traffic paved state highway onto a two-track under a power line. They also route you off low traffic paved county roads and onto gravel roads. I realize that the bicycle route mapping is "beta" but they seem to have some rather arbitrary algorithms that take you off pavement and onto gravel for no perceivable reason.

---

12/11/12 5:25 PM

There needs to be a wikipedia kind of effort started for mapping.
Instead of proprietary stuff from Google, Apple, Garmin, Nokia etc.

Start from the basic maps that the US government makes available for free. And through crowdsourcing, produce something of much better quality than any of these companies could do.

It'd take a few years but I bet it would be the best...

Sandiway

12/11/12 5:37 PM

That's a good idea. Why don't you do it? ;-)

12/11/12 7:53 PM

If I didn't have a day job (that I need to pay my bills),
I'd like to do it. Seriously. It'd be a nice programming project.

Sandiway

12/11/12 8:02 PM

Google maps already has a way to feed them "crowd source" data. I have done that and seen them make changes. In other cases I have done that and they didn't make the changes. I'm guessing they didn't understand my comments or maybe read only part of my comments.

You can access MapMyRide for routes, and you could say that is crowd sourcing. The problem is that most people put in smaller loops rather than long rides or point to point rides.

12/11/12 8:47 PM

Being a software jock, I was thinking there's got to be a way to finance the project so you can quit your day job... :D

How about getting one of your student to do the programming? ;-)

12/11/12 9:31 PM

Tom Tom supposedly has a crowdsource type update system. I kept it up to date but it didn't seem to matter. All I know is over and over that system (whether crowdsource or proprietary) led me into parking lots and goose chases over and over. It became a running joke.

12/12/12 4:10 AM

There is a mapping app that does it already. I tried it for a bit but it WS not well executed. I can't even remember the name of the app.

12/12/12 2:52 PM

OpenStreetMap is a crowdsourced mapping site. I haven't used it much, but one of my sons uses it a lot (and contributes a lot of edits). I don't know how much, if anything, it has done that's cycling-oriented, but I'd be surprised if there isn't something in the works.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page

12/13/12 8:52 AM

Google just released a new map app for iPhones. Not for the iPpad as yet.

As would be expected, it has better live traffic then Apple maps, whose traffic data is terrible as I discovered yesterday.

Isn't the primary map app for iPhone though, so won't launch from a contact address and no way to make it do so. In fact, I've not yet found a method to access the phone's contacts, so it won't launch a search from your contacts. That sucks.

SB

12/14/12 5:32 AM

It has voice nav on iPhone 4 too.

And apple can't do it?