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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently in Pokara, Nepal and Google maps has definitely hallucinated a lot of streets that don't exist (computer vision false positives I presume) This makes Google useless for routing because it sends you into dead end alleys and driveways it thinks cross through to the next road.

Organic Maps (OSM client) on the other hand is much more accurate and supports offline routing.

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Organic Maps or OSM-based maps in general are great, but for routing nothing can replace Google Maps (or Waze) here yet, because they are the only ones with actual, near real-time traffic data.

And here in Belgium, your 100 km trip could take anywhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours depending on whether there's traffic in the Kennedytunnel or an accident in Nazareth. It's crucial for me to check traffic before I leave, so if there's a one-hour traffic jam I can just do whatever else for an hour before leaving.

And I haven't found a way to check that without Google Maps yet. But I use OsmAnd if I'm not taking the highway.

Even in Europe Google Maps can be surprisingly bad. For example, in Portugal, their routing algorithm thought you could drive across the top of this dam. But when you get there, you absolutely cannot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jBRNbeqZiY9cu8eL9 If you zoom out, you'll see it's quite a long detour to backtrack.

(I reported this mistake, and it seems to be corrected now)

Could it be that motorcycles can drive there? I get routing errors where maps will show a turn where there's only a divider and a pedestrian size opening. I notice motorcycles taking a shortcut there though.

I’m surprised they can’t flag these misclassified roads by tracking traffic flow through them. A bad road should exhibit little traffic (or even more reroutes).

Just simple neglect. Not enough revenue from the region to warrant operation and engineering time.

Both good and bad roads in remote areas will likely appear to have zero traffic flow data as there is no cell phone coverage.

It doesn't need to be all or nothing. The traffic flow algo can ignore regions with known zero cell coverage. Perhaps we can fill the gaps with inertial navigation if there is at least some traffic.

This is common in South Asia. Even cities like Chennai have this happen. I was driving down a road that became narrower and narrower until I had to back up or end up like a character in a Junji Ito manga.

This happened to us in Minorca. It was a pain to backup 50 meters with only 20cm of clearance.

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