Maybe they don't care about poor countries with lower usage, but I'd be embarrassed to have that in my product.

Having said that, rich western Europe is in some ways no better. If you create a public transport route, Google maps will send you walking hundreds of meters around non-existent barriers, or sometimes insist that you go one tram stop past and then catch the tram back to the stop you want to go to.

Maps, like search seems to be slowly suffering from some sort of corporate rot over at Google.

Similarly when I was in Bangkok wandering around, Google wanted to cross the train tracks at a road that tripled the walking distance to the destination. In reality it was possible to cross the train tracks (i.e an actual crossing, not just anywhere). Worse it was much more dangerous to walk the Google route.

Fixing it on OSM was easy. Fixing it on Google was a pain because it had to be submitted and checked and approved (which it eventually was).

There are definitely places where OSM is far outstripping Google maps. Especially when it comes to non-roads.

Routing me through a park in the middle of the night, when it was closed, was one. Taking me on a detour to avoid a busy road, which turned to be on a farm track where the road surface was completely destroyed, was another.

Not to mention that maps at that point (and still) doesn't understand cycling directions. It could often steal focus from google maps. Very annoying and I nearly forgot about it until you mentioned it here.

Needless to say, there is often some sucker going through there, and I have to admit I ended up there once too exactly because of Google Maps. No effort to correct it over the years, in one of the wealthiest and most important power/finance centers globally.

What you and parent describe happened to me too, maps are absolute blessing compared to what was there before but they are sometimes not that great ie in cities with a lot of traffic. Its easy to get used to something just working and start demanding perfection, when we are maybe 96% there.

For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the majority of their userbase is.

It seems that the only way to get google to listen nowadays is to create a giant media buzz.

This is unacceptable given that cycling the wrong way is illegal and dangerous.

In large cities, the roads are the only routes, so pedestrians can go OK with GMaps. Anywhere else & Google is prone to send you waltzing down a main road instead of the paths marked for actual pedestrian use in my experience. Same for cycling.

Thanks for trying, at least: You weren’t able to shift leviathan, but there’s no shame in that.

Nevertheless, when trying for navigation guidance to the street on the other bank of the river, many map applications insisted I could drive right across that disused bridge. Until recently, only OpenStreetMap and Google Maps presented the correct information. Apple Maps, TomTom, and Sygic all insisted I had to drive right across mud and the disused bridge (that would not be suitable for a car anyway).

These maps also reported there had been a street in the other part of the town where there was only barely a boundary between two fields.

I've been reporting this via Apple Maps feedback, complete with photos, for three years straight with no response whatsoever. I think one of my feedbacks just had been closed. Then a year ago Apple Maps got refreshed and their data sources got better, at least now they don't show roads where there are none.

Google Maps used to navigate me in the wrong directions on one-way streets months, if not years, after the changes had been made. They also seem to choose the shittiest routes ever when driving from any A to B, like the narrowest unmaintained countryside roads with steep gradients, and ETA seems to be drugs-induced fiction, like their information on speed limits and the actual speed attainable on those roads is waaaay off.

OSMAnd and OSM data in general is way better, I only wish it was recalculating the routes faster. Oh, and live traffic information.

I'm glad at least there's some movement to have some accountability about that clusterfuck. But then again, whom am I kidding, that won't move the needle in ad sales so nobody's giving a shit.

The Google map doesn’t have symbols to distinguish major roads from minor ones. For instance, in the US a printed map would typically have different symbols for free limited-access highway, toll limited-access highway, multilane divided but not limited-access highway, major two-lane road, minor two-lane road, local road, gravel road, and dirt road. Google has none of this; it just has lines of vaguely different width and color intensity.

So in the US I know that if the route has an Interstate highway I know what to expect. Typically a US highway is at least a major route, though you can’t count on it. If it’s a state highway, who knows. The map tells you little about the size or condition of these non-Interstate routes.

So if Google routes me down a non-Interstate route, sometimes I will look at the street view to gauge it. If it shows a big divided highway, I’m good. But sometimes it shows a two-lane road with no shoulders, multiple driveways, and hills blocking the view. Completely unacceptable for driving more than a few miles if there’s absolutely any alternative, yet Google will send you down these roads for two hundred miles if it thinks you’ll save ten minutes—-which you won’t the instant you get stuck behind some slow dump truck.

I don’t know this situation in Russia but years ago on a paper map in the US, that deadly route would have been shown as a minor road on a paper map, in it was on there at all, while the major, safer route would have been shown prominently.

I just marvel at how tech takes us forward in most ways but how the old tech had superior elements that simply don’t get replicated even decades later. (Another example is how old print maps showed rest areas and even distinguished them from simple no-restroom pull-offs. This information is not on Google at all.)