Same in Netherlands. Google Maps has recently become worse and worse. Small pedestrian roads are missing, and the navigation is getting stupid. Google applies the one-way limitations for cars also on cycling routes.
While Apple is still playing catch-up, it appears to me that cycling, and all other features mentioned in the article, are exceptionally ameliorable to machine learning, and its advances over the last few years.
Apple being the only other company in the world with access to the wealth of position data on users' phones, and the financial muscle to purchase any satellite images they want to get their hands on, shouldn't have too much of a difficulty of replicating these.
I seem to remember discovering Google's bike directions, including the height profiles, a few months later and being slightly miffed that it wasn't available for my trip.
Or that cycling doesn't offer referrals…
Close, but imho is has more to do with liability, a fear common at all american companies. Car drivers are licensed. They can be expected to obey traffic laws. So when google sends them down the wrong way on a one-way road, nobody blames google. They blame the adult who listened to their phone rather than the signs. But bicyclists are not licensed. If google says that a road is open to cyclists when it isn't, and something bad happens, few will blame the 12yo unlicensed cyclist just following their phone's directions. This is why google, imho, seems to be limiting bicycle routes to those areas with the most clearly defined paths, preferably separate from roads.
And the one-way thing for bike routes is likely based on the widespread understanding that bicycles on roads must obey all the rules that cars do. Going the wrong way on a one-way road is illegal in many areas no matter what vehicle you use. This may never be enforced, but google's legal team probably isn't willing to depart from the letter of the law.
It also presents an alternate route, but the traffic environment here isn't such that the route under the viaduct makes any sense.
(this is in small town usa)
It routes me onto a dangerous arterial road rather than the pleasant multiuse park path that is directly adjacent to the arterial road (and which is my normal cycling route). The Google Maps recommendation here is quite bad and possibly dangerous. The alternate route goes on another heavily-trafficked road rather than the quiet surburban street a block away that is a designated cycle route marked with bicycle signs and sharrows (which was my previous cycling route).
There are many examples of one-way roads with two-way bike lanes, ie San Francisco:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco+City+Hall/@3...
Well of course we were explicitly not talking about the other closed, US corporate-owned map datasets, but the open one.
Who cares if they have options for cycling or not.
But thanks for bringing the topic back to Apple, mr "iNerdier".
WAG: is Google preparing to be Amazon's drones mapping service that thy care so munch to even know each and every building/caravan is?
If this were a feature for something like drone landing, it wouldn't show up in the public rendering of maps. Google has boatloads of mapping information they don't show, such as travel times, detailed scenic values, allowed turns etc. And building shapes alone are both too little for landing a drone (it doesn't show detailed vegetation or power lines), as well as too much (you only need flat/not flat to land, not the detailed roof shape of different sections of a building).
Insider perspective: I don't know why building shapes were added specifically, but you can honestly get away with basically justifying a project at Google with "because it would be cool".
There's a lot of reasons you can get away with it: Google has lots of internal tools and resources and data which makes it easy to do cool things, Google is pretty well off and can afford to not be particularly "lean", and Management can justify cool things because cool things are like basic science (as the article points out) and lets you build more cool things and because users like cool things ("magic moments").
So it's very possible that the reason building shapes were added were because someone realized it wouldn't take that much work to do using Google's existing data, machine learning & computer vision research, and computational infrastructure and thought it would be cool, they convinced someone in middle-management it would be cool and a half dozen people worked on it for a year or two.
[It could have also been a calculated, top-down decision and required hundreds of people working for a decade with laser focus; that happens too sometimes, I don't actually know.]
Now that there’s some money floating around again for a couple years, mew bridges and joins and larger road works look more common everywhere.
From here it looks like that google mapping quality is more or less the same, but the rate of change of the urban landscape increased leaving a larger gap between actual and mapped.
(That is for maps alone, street view is extremely outdated across all Italy)
To find a one-way street that applies to cyclists would be an exception.
It's actually super annoying, and I don't think I've seen a road done like this in last 2-3 years.
Edit: but yeah, that is _slightly different_.
It's probably caused by some third party app or rarely-tested phone model. They take in app feedback into account when deciding what to work on next.
In France, it is legal:
* in all "30 km/h zones" (which are a bit different from a single street with a 30 km/h limit), unless specifically disallowed in a specific street;
* in all "'meeting' zones" (where the speed limit is 20 km/h and pedestrians have special rights);
* and of course anywhere where it is specifically allowed.