Hacker News Reader

Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

Not for anyone that lives in rural areas. Trust me.

I'm a consultant in a rural area in the PNW and Google maps is literally unusable to access 80% of my client's properties.

View on HN

Living in Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico I was actually pretty surprised by how well Google Maps has worked. It knows my dirt/gravel roads pretty well.

I've lived in Washington for 10 years and I have found several roads I am familiar with that have changed due to landslides in that time. I would guess at least 10 roads in the state have washouts that change the course of the road every year. In the wilderness they often aren't repaired and become footpaths.

I can only speculate but I'd guess the issue is that the trees and mountains casue a lot of multipathing, theres no wifi stations or cell towers at all to cross-check, and the traffic volume is so low, you can't really fall back to statistical methods. That doesn't even get into the fact that there's often a labrynthe of private roads that all technically have the same name, typically given by rhe nearest large creek or stream. Google seems to have a REALLY hard time differentiating the gated private driveways from the more "arterial" ungated sections of these roads.

Caltopo and forest service roads are the best for last mile backcountry driving in my experience. Google maps is indeed really sketchy in those situations.

The app Gaia GPS has MVUM (motor vehicle use maps by the US forest service) that are outstanding. You can use multiple map layers at once. You can use the Caltopo plus the MVUM to see which areas are open and passable.

The MVUM are great but I've found that there are still many county and locally maintained but non-private roads, which aren't in the federal USFS/BLM MVUM and make it a bit annoying to figure out whats actually open.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com