Street address errors in Google Maps
164 comments
·April 25, 2025aethr
reaperman
Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”
https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...
defrost
I skimmed and I think that's missing
That a building|property will have only one address.
Sometimes (eg: rural Australia) property addresses are updated from an older numbered lot based system (that goes astray when properties are subdivided and infill houses appear) to a system that numbers houses by driveway distance from last major intersection.
For five or ten years a house can be recieving mail or be on the records with both the old and the new address.
layman51
I think this idea that a building/property can have more than one address can happen in the United States too. The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]
So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you would see that they recommend using the city name of “Houston” for mail, but they would also recognize “West University Place”. There’s also a city called “Southside Place” which should be avoided when it comes to sending mail. But then that kind of makes me think that if a house is within the limits of one or these small cities, then it could in theory have the same street name but have two different city values in different databases.
Then on the other hand there’s a somewhat related problem where a small town or village (e.g. Somers, WI and Scotland, CT) can have multiple ZIP codes and that ends up causing a lot of headaches for the residents of the town since they all might live nearby but then each section of the town might end up associated with some other larger city it’s closest to.
[1]: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode
makeitdouble
It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)
Fogest
I used to be a EMS call taker/dispatch (911) in Ontario, Canada. Addresses could be such a pain, especially in the the more rural areas. There were multiple townships around some bigger cities. They had different naming schemes and suffered from a similar problem that you mentioned. Many of the addresses also had old addresses. Our system would luckily often have both versions of the address stored, but not always. Additionally a lot of our roads have both numbers to address them by, such as "Regional Road 12", but then they'd also have an actual name. Almost every went by the actual name, however in the rural areas sometimes they had old real names, but it never was "official" so it isn't even listed.
Overall addresses are such a mess, and they are a mess even for governmental agencies like this one.
plorkyeran
I don’t know how they came to be, but in rural America I have seen houses which have signs very explicitly saying that two or more addresses are all this one house, so please deliver anything addressed to any of them.
bigstrat2003
The building in that example does have only one address. The old address is not valid any more. People just accept the erroneous use of the old address for the sake of expediency.
tangus
Besides that, in Buenos Aires, for instance, every access to the street has its own address. A building with 2 entrances (front door and garage) has 2 addresses, etc.
stingraycharles
Where I currently live, my street has no name, my house has no number. If a package is delivered by mail, my phone number needs to be put on the package, and the local delivery operator calls me to either pick it up, or I send my location through telegram and they deliver it to my house.
It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all.
The same goes for my country or origin (in EU), they require my address in order to be able to send important mail. It’s just not possible because of the computer systems not accepting anything without a zipcode, address and house number.
BobaFloutist
What's preventing some local authority from just naming your street?
And what's preventing you and your neighbors from having a meeting, agreeing on a numbering convention, and putting street numbers on your house? I guess it would be a bit silly/meaningless if you don't have your street name.
m463
Sounds like you have something a little like Carmel, California:
https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses
A unique characteristic of Carmel-by-the-Sea is that there are no street addresses. Properties are identified, for example, as being on the "west side of San Antonio Street, 3 houses south of 12th Avenue". In addition to this, many owners give their homes a name. The name you choose does not have to be approved or registered with the City.
duped
How do you specify your location? GPS coordinates?
dataflow
> It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al
The "almost" is interesting - how do you do it in reality?
rblatz
Why don’t you name your road and assign a house number? Either just make it up, or to make it more official contact your local government and propose a name and numbering scheme for it.
bobsmooth
Have you tried adding delivery instructions? But I guess you couldn't complete an Amazon order without an address.
BlueTemplar
> From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua
James C. Scott would be proud.
kccqzy
> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system
That's not the original ethos of Google: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I don't know about now but twenty years ago Google almost certainly thought it worthwhile to encode the rules of every regional system. Add that to Larry and Sergey's "healthy disregard for the impossible" I'm willing to bet that twenty years ago Google had almost certainly made it feasible to do just that: encode the rules of every regional system.
jsnell
20 years ago I think the coverage area of Google Maps was still strictly limited to the US + UK. Like, the rest of the world map was empty.
But I worked on Google's geocoding (mapping names to locations) and reverse geocoding (mapping locations to names) systems 15 years ago, and encoding every local ruleset was absolutely not how it worked. Or even encoding any of them.
And what's described in the post are exactly the kinds of problems you'd have back then as well.
Some of these were upstream data quality issues, some were due to deep infrastructure problems that could not have been addressed without a complete rewrite, and others just basic recall/precision tradeoffs around the value of returning a result that doesn't match the query exactly.
charlieyu1
And it didn’t last long. Simplified Chinese has creeped into Google Map Hong Kong for years.
brucedawson
I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.
If my fixes had been published in the promised 24 hours then this blog post would not have been written but after two weeks this is the best idea I could come up with.
I think it is practical for Google Maps to understand the systems used in most major cities and then use this knowledge to reduce the number of errors.
I also think it is possible for the feedback system to work better. It does work sometimes, but it is slow and opaque and unreliable. It's even worse for bike directions.
jonny_eh
> I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.
The friend's cousin did what they could have done themselves, use the feedback tool.
brucedawson
Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced.
So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be determined if that will help or not.
Given that Google Maps understands the rules for street addresses in Vancouver it seems like the problem shouldn't have happened in the first place and should have been auto-corrected and the fix should have been quickly accepted. But none of that happened.
Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.
stitched2gethr
And yet some of the accepted changes still haven't taken affect.
throw432196
Your bio says that you are a programmer at google. That says a lot to how impossible the situation is to most people. Google maps has been telling me bs for years. When I lived in Cyprus, asking directions to a business would often lead to empty lots. I assumed it was caused by competitors sabotaging the database with bogus updates..
Dylan16807
You're making the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.
wat10000
I wouldn't automatically assume that they don't have such checks. Checking an entry for reasonableness is a good idea, but it needs to be overrideable. Sometimes you'll need an entry that isn't actually reasonable by whatever definitions you use. And then you'll tend to have your workers get used to the override and not actually think about whether it might have a point.
crooked-v
So who's responsible for then figuring out what nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions of nested regions, that then does and doesn't apply to?
Dylan16807
You don't need that.
crooked-v
For a practical example here, check out Mumbai, India in Google Maps and look at addresses of various businesses there, most of which amount to "Building Soandso on Road X near Landmark Suchandsuch in neighborhood Y" (ans often written in a non-standardized way, on top of that). To compensate, delivery apps there have you visually put a pin on a map as a standard part of checkout flows.
criddell
> it’s probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system
Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some.
Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.
ajsnigrutin
Wait what?
I live in a small country of ~2mio pop, and we have approximately 6000 settlements with streets and street addresses and many different standards of numberings, depending on many reason, mostly historic.
Technically yes, a few thousand systems could be programmed into some google processing engine, but you'd have to manually classify every road to set the correct system, and even there, you'd never know what is a legit numbering scheme or what is an error.
For example, Cucumber street 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 on one side of the street and Cucumber street 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 on the other is a valid numbering scheme. If #3 splits his front yard and builds another house, you'd get "3a" on that side. If #6 buys #8, demolishes one or both buildings and builds a bigger one, that could become either a "6" or an "8", and the other would be missing. Then #7 is demolished and an apartment building is built there with 4 entrances to 4 separate building sections, so those would be numbered 7a, 7b, 7c and 7d, even though they're in the same building. #5, #7 and #9 are also a part of the same building (three entrances), but the building is older, the street was renamed and renumbered some time after, and each of the entrances got its own number. Then you come to #10, which is also a building with 4 entrances, but #10 goes towards Cucumber street, and the other three are facing the Lettuce street and are thus Lettuce street 6, 6a and 6b. Notice starting with the "6" here and "7a" above, well, that's because #6 lettuce street existed before the building was expanded, it kept the #6 number, but since there used to be a shed on Cucumber street #7, the new building starts with 7a.
Good luck writing a general model for that.
anyfoo
Your "Cucumber street" is exactly like Germany works, as far as I can tell, including the even/odd split, and the a/b/c/d... when inserting new houses, or separate building sections. (I've seen as far as "h" in one extreme case, but I think after "d" becomes pretty uncommon.)
Was that intentional, or just neat coincidence?
Confusion
The problem isn’t addresses being a few (tens of) meters off.
criddell
> Good luck writing a general model for that.
Sounds like you described the general model.
Anyway, if your little country is difficult for Google, they should probably skip it for now. Do New York first. Then L.A. Then Toronto. It doesn’t have to cover everything, just make things better for a meaningful number of people.
stevage
> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.
This is literally true when talking about the entire planet, but this is Vancouver.
There are many geocoding systems that do just fine with the considerable range of addressing schemes in the developed world.
Something very weird is going on here, like Google finding a cheaper method for geocoding that is probabilistic and yields a level of errors they are ok with.
timewizard
> and even within a country there are often many different conventions.
You know who knows this? The tax authority.
> the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.
Large freight does not work this way. I worked on top of a ski resort for a while. We had a mapped address right where the ski left let out instead of the base of the hill. In the summer you could drive up to it on an ATV easily and a pickup truck if it hadn't recently rained. Somehow a semi truck driver for a freight company got this address and mapped a route to it. We were quite surprised to see the 53' box truck driving up the side of the ski hill.
> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.
The information is encoded elsewhere and it's a bummer there is no incentive to make it as open and widely available as is possible. Although if delivery can rely only on partial information to "complete the next leg" then why can't address lookup do precisely the same thing?
kccqzy
If the author can use the Google Maps feedback tool to get the errors fixed, I'm pretty sure somewhere on the internet someone with malice can also use the same feedback tool to place the address at the wrong location. The only safeguard is probably a low-paid contractor in India reviewing these manual suggestions.
One year ago the Elizabeth line disappeared from the maps in London. There are many Reddit posts about this such as https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/... and https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/.... I asked a friend who worked at Google and they said that it was because some poor workers in India accidentally hid it while fixing something else.
Twirrim
Someone did this a couple of years ago for a major thoroughfare near where I lived. They marked it as one way for a key stretch, and traffic ended up being re-routed down much smaller roads to avoid it. It caused all sorts of chaos, both due to the increased traffic on roads not made for it, and in the long queues that formed where the traffic then rejoined the thoroughfare.
It took google at least the best part of a month to fix it (at least, it was around a month from when I submitted the correction, no idea if others beat me to it)
paulmooreparks
Google does have a nearly impossible task making Maps work around the world, and I think it does an admirable job. One just has to have a bit of local knowledge to work around the quirks. For example, the walking directions Maps gives for Singapore are usually ridiculous. They're almost always twice the distance they need to be, since it's very common to cut through the open lower floor (void deck) of apartment buildings (HDB blocks) to get anywhere on foot here. I typically just use the walking directions to get a bearing, point the compass pointer toward the destination, and start walking in as nearly a straight line as I can, ignoring the circuitous path Maps suggests.
Driving directions on the expressways here are also spotty. If I wait for Maps to tell me to exit the expressway, I'm already at or past the exit. I basically have to already kind of know where I'm going to make use of driving directions (you know, like we used to do with paper maps). Never mind that there are actual bugs in the directions: at one spot on the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE), if I need to exit onto the MCE, it tells me to exit onto the AYE, which is incorrect).
Still, I guess it's better than nothing.
paulmooreparks
And another one I just thought of: If I ask for driving directions to a mall or office building (here in Singapore, anyway), it nearly always sends me to the taxi drop-off, not the entrance to the carpark. I have to drop a pin on the carpark entrance (which presumes that I know where it is) to get sane directions. Otherwise, I end up on the wrong side of the building in gridlocked traffic trying to find the carpark.
brucedawson
That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it can't possibly reliably give you correct directions. I'd love to see that fixed.
Twirrim
Google Maps can be downright dangerous in its lack of knowledge, and it'll make routing decisions that other GPS devices don't make (despite similarly working around the world). For example, it cannot comprehend the idea of country lanes in the UK, where e.g. TomTom can. Country lanes are narrow, twisty, and single file with passing places. But they're "national speed limit", or 60mph. You will never, ever go down one of these at 60mph. In most cases it's flat out impossible. Google Maps thinks you can go that fast.
If enough people using google maps have been down it in the right time frame it'll know the road is slow and account for it in time calculations, and generally not send you down it. The fact that no one using google maps has ever managed to go down that lane at 60mph never seems to enter into its consideration.
I've never had TomTom send me down a country lane unless it's literally the only way to get to where I'm going.
brucedawson
Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading to real-life consequences.
After two weeks of failing to fix the most significant error that I found I decided to blog about the issue in hopes of getting the attention of the Google Maps team, and also to share what I found.
Loughla
Google maps also includes towns in rural areas that don't exist.
There are 4 listed within 20 miles of my house that haven't existed for well over 100 years. They're not incorporated anymore, and they don't exist on any other maps, just Google.
It's weird.
echoangle
Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map:
Loughla
So the towns that show up did exist at one point in the 1800's and early 1900's for a couple. They were towns in the past, but aren't anymore. So I'm not sure they're paper towns. As I understand it, those never existed at all.
misswaterfairy
Map Men have a fun take on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI
(Their whole series is brilliant too!)
Dylan16807
Four of them in basically the same spot?
davidkwast
Good one. These are the real easter eggs
bombcar
Various maps ingest almost random data - around where I am the street maps (plots) are about 50 feet diagonally off.
It’s entirely visible if you overlay satellite with the map, but it’ll probably never be fixed.
cozzyd
I've noticed that Google maps now tries sometimes to incorporate building entrances into walking directions. I wonder if misplaced building entrances may be part of the explanation.
brucedawson
It drives me crazy that Google Maps sometimes asks me where the entrance to a building is but it never seems to be clear about what it is asking. Where a pedestrian would enter? Where a car would enter?
Driving directions are a wonderful thing but they need to account for whether you are arriving in a ride-share vehicle (please drop me at the front entrance) or in a car you need to park (the front entrance may be worthless) - lots of work yet to be done.
Fogest
I have the same dilemma, but it has even more factors to consider such as different staff entrances and parking lots.
For example, at my work I enter on a different side of the building with my vehicle as a staff. When on foot there is also a different staff entrance than the public entrance. I actually often don't put in my work for navigating, I instead put in a manually saved set of coordinates of where the parking lot entrance is. Because it can make a difference on which way it suggests for navigation.
swatcoder
Really cool and thorough work! Thanks for sharing!
My own first intuition is that it's not actually a data problem at all, and that "Google Maps has no concept of.." might simply reflect the ongoing, enshittening, transition from structured "concepts" to ML "vibes" for products like Google's.
It's not that the underlying maps data store has the addresses wrong, but there's a layer between the input field and the result generator that's statistically deciding you mean something besides what you explicitly enterred and is giving you a route to a silently "corrected" address.
We've seen that happening more and more in Search for years, silently ignoring keywords and directives without a "did you mean" callout, and it would seem natural for some product owner to be pushing an equivalent initiative in Maps. Aggregate metrics move the right way, so the company is happy, but of course the actual product experience sees a fractal failure pattern that nobody can quite address but makes results less and less reliable.
I'd love to be wrong, though, as I think this would be a terrible advent for something that can be life-critical like a popular mapping tool.
makeitdouble
While Google is no stranger to enshittification, I think Maps (and Contacts) are two services where it's just damn hard.
In particular it was developed in the western world from a startup, so the first approach probably was minimal and adapted to local streets, without even covering the edge cases.
Going from that to mapping every single address in the world is a huge leap and the underlying data system must be an incredible mess, also creating regressions on what used to be reliable.
I don't know if they got to it, but a few years ago you couldn't have vertical stacking (e.g. floors), shops with the same address needed workarounds to have a different entry.
Then some places have multiple addresses. The article talks about street numbers making sense, but in most places in the world they don't, disappear at random points, some countries don't have street names. We could talk about it years.
null
pianom4n
"Is the parcel in the geographical bounds of the city name entered?"
The "city name" on an address isn't really a "city". SFO's address is "San Francisco, CA", but is not within SF city limits.
Queens NY addresses have "cities" that are just neighborhoods.
Applying any kind of logic to addresses will just be a minefield.
wat10000
The Pentagon's address even has the wrong state. The address is Washington, DC, but it's in Arlington, VA.
Calwestjobs
i heard that is original secret underground metro system entrance location !
mayneack
In much of unincorporated america, the most valid form of an address just uses the nearest city regardless of boundaries. Almost nowhere actually guarantees that every bit of land is even in a city limits. At the margins, addresses are unstructured free form text that is correct if it can be interpreted by a human with local knowledge.
amluto
There’s also no particular reason to expect that an address corresponds to exactly one parcel or that any given parcel has an address at all or that any given parcel has at most one address.
astura
Yeah, this is bizarre. I don't know how it works in Canada but in the US the city/zip of the mailing address is just the location of the post office that delivers mail. It has nothing to do with the municipal the address is actually in.
null
graywh
hundreds of people in my city-county really think they live in a city in the next county over just because of the "city" label on their zip code
mastercheif
I will give credit to the Google Maps team—they handle Queens NYC street address correctly.
Apple Maps drives me nuts—it will only return search results if you include the hyphen in the four digit street address ie: "36-08 33rd St" vs "3608 33rd St". Google will hit on either query.
The hyphen is a part of the "official" address. However, USPS has declared it unnecessary, there's no advantage to using it unless you're navigating by analog map, and it's a PITA to type on a mobile keyboard.
So if anyone on Apple Maps team is here: please fix this. I filled a apple.com/feedback ticket on this years ago.
For anyone interested in the peculiar history of Queens addresses—they convey a cross street and the number of the house ascending going northward.
For example: 36-08 33rd St means that the house is on 33rd St, between 35th and 36th ave, and is house #08 on the block.
https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-res...
That said, Apple Maps is far superior to Google Maps for transit directions, at least in NYC. Google's integration with the MTA is seriously lacking—their directions often do not reflect scheduled changes in routes, let alone real-time issues. That said, Google Maps is superior with POI search and address decoding.
sleepy_keita
Adresses are notoriously hard, and it varies from country to country, and even within countries. I've been working on Japanese address data, and while you may be able to trust Google with an address in the city, there's a large probability that it'll send you somewhere else (sometimes > 10km) in rural areas.
bombcar
I wonder if trying to support strange international address styles (like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued, not ordinal from a center point) and/or trying to scan imagery for addresses is confusing it.
The fact it gets the street wrong indicates a tokenization issue somewhere.
Any evidence it happens to non-numeric streets like Main Street or Martin Luther Blvd, or is it only 10th st types of things?
ForOldHack
I was on Seoul for 18 months, and despite significant study, I have, never been able to decode their system despite at least 100 requests for some insights.
Loughla
>like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued
Holy shit what an absolutely needless nightmare of a system. How do you expect people to find anything like that?
pezezin
Japan is even worse than that, as they don't even use street names. The specific details depend on the municipality, but in summary:
- Municipalities are divided hierarchically into named neighborhoods, districts, wards, or "sections" (字/"aza", I don't know the correct translation). A single municipality might combine different kinds of divisions for historical reasons.
- Those are then divided into numbered blocks, plots, and buildings. The numbers are assigned in chronological order, and are rarely spatially sequential.
All in all, the system is extremely confusing, and the chaotic urban "planning" of most Japanese cities doesn't help. So how do people move around? They use maps; in the big cities like Tokyo there are street maps in all the major areas, otherwise you use your smartphone.
bombcar
Hey, at least they have numbers!
In some areas the streets have no names, nor do the buildings have numbers.
If there’s three streets and twelve houses, why do you need any of those?
monktastic1
Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact).
Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).
trollbridge
Google Maps decided my driveway is a road, and also gave it a (non-existent) name. I have attempted to update this information, but Google just rejects my suggestions as "not accepted".
So we now regularly get people driving down here or trying to park, when it's actually just a one-lane driveway.
graywh
double-check it on openstreetmap.org
trollbridge
It’s correct on there (and if it weren’t, I could fix it).
jwr
The real problem is that Google Maps isn't regulated like a utility. I know, I know, we all hate regulation, we love free markets, and all. But bear with me for a moment.
I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps.
The problem is that at this point Google Maps is so ubiquitous that people accept it as "truth". And that is a problem when it shows an incorrect location: people can't get to your place, package deliveries are delayed, etc.
Unfortunately, things that are so ubiquitous in our lives require regulation — at the very least, Google should be required to process (and verify) requests for corrections in a timely manner.
at_a_remove
I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind.
Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.
I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden.
Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like.
It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends.
Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all!
And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road.
Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all.
Road addressing is Fractally Bad.
Twirrim
In this particular case, Apple Maps seems to have it correct, so at least some official source of data must be right?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=136+W+6th+Ave%2C+Vancouver%2C+BC%2...
jwr
None of that applies in my particular case: my country does have a database of addresses and the lookup of the address in question (my address) did produce the correct geographic location.
It was Google that did not bother to update their data for years.
astura
>I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps.
I've had this problem for the 10 years I've lived at my address. Google has even changed where they usually send people, which is just a different kind of wrong. Non-existent locations on the other side of town.
It's very frustrating. I usually give people the address of a nearby business. I dare not order food delivery.
Once I ordered a consumer product "next day delivery" which I had no idea would summon an Uber Eats driver. I texted him the correct location once he showed up to the incorrect one. When he got to my house Uber wouldn't even let him complete the delivery because his GPS was so far from what it thought the delivery location was. He had to call them to resolve it.
I've tried to correct it myself about 10 times. I have had all my friends try to correct it from their accounts.
I still don't think that Google Maps should be regulated though. I think it's a ridiculous thing to suggest. I just don't think regulation is the answer to every inconvenience.
precommunicator
If you directly use Google Maps Geocoding API you will see in response there what type of address is it and is it precise location or estimation.
In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions.
The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.
Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.