I ran into a surprising problem with Google maps recently. "Ok Google, driving directions to Fremont Central Park"
Google locates the park address as 40000 Paseo Padre Pkwy, Fremont 94538. The pin is dropped in a fine place, at the building by the Lake Elizabeth boat ramp.
I mostly know where I'm going anyway, and as I come up Washington Blvd I notice it's asking me to turn early, so I follow just for kicks. Inexplicably, gmaps directs me to an area about a mile to the south of my destination, at the end of the Railroad Ave trail (https://goo.gl/maps/G5xV7MDemtbtmNYRA). It then appears to suggest that I park and walk the trail for a mile to get to my destination. In the middle of downtown Fremont! When using driving directions!
The weirdest part is that gmaps clearly knows that it's taken me to the wrong place. There's a dotted line instructing me to walk a mile along a footpath. But then, why not just take me to the actual destination address in my car, which has a huge parking lot? I can't wrap my head around what's going wrong in this scenario.
This wasn't a fluke. I reliably get told that this is the best way to the park. If gmaps can be this wildly wrong in the middle of Fremont CA then I can only imagine how bad it gets in rural areas.
I suspect I know the cause of this -- there was a change to Google Maps not long ago, related to how it computes destination points when your destination is a large area (such as a large park.) It used to try to take you to the official address, or some central point; these days, what I observe is that it takes you to _some_ point where the road hits the edge of the destination area. I'm not sure how it chooses what point, but it looks like it missed.
(Note: I don't work for Google, and haven't for many years. I mostly noticed this change because it finally fixed a longstanding directions issue that I first reported ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, involving directions to the Pittsburgh International Airport.)
That's pretty weird, thanks for reporting this! I work at Google in the Maps org, I reported your bug internally and will update this once I have a resolution.
I'd be happy to report routing problems to Open Street Maps or similar. I'm happy to contribute to open data.
Actually I would also have been happy to report it to Google a few years back but I have to say our relationship seems to have turned adversarial in the interim and I'm fairly sure it wasn't my doing.
Hey, thanks! Usually I use the in app reporting, but the thing about maps in particular is often when there's a problem I'm either driving or at my destination and need to go. In this case, I saw the story and then recalled the earlier issue. I figure talking about problems on HN has a very high probability of getting the attention of someone who can fix them ;)
Yeah, that's a pretty common problem. I'm sure they are actively working on making sending feedback easier :). In the meantime, your technique worked! The issue is now fixed!
Why does Google not have these links accessible somewhere? It seems like you shouldn’t have to hunt through old forums to find the appropriate contact.... why can a Trillion dollar company not make this more easily discoverable?
Tried that... you get a generic response and then no one ever follows up. Someone took over several of my email accounts and created a fake YouTube channel and Adwords/Adsense/Google ads account. Every time I reach out, they ignore and never get back to me. Pretty frustrating that Google is essentially enabling criminals and ignoring the victims.
Google locates the park address as 40000 Paseo Padre Pkwy, Fremont 94538. The pin is dropped in a fine place, at the building by the Lake Elizabeth boat ramp.
I mostly know where I'm going anyway, and as I come up Washington Blvd I notice it's asking me to turn early, so I follow just for kicks. Inexplicably, gmaps directs me to an area about a mile to the south of my destination, at the end of the Railroad Ave trail (https://goo.gl/maps/G5xV7MDemtbtmNYRA). It then appears to suggest that I park and walk the trail for a mile to get to my destination. In the middle of downtown Fremont! When using driving directions!
The weirdest part is that gmaps clearly knows that it's taken me to the wrong place. There's a dotted line instructing me to walk a mile along a footpath. But then, why not just take me to the actual destination address in my car, which has a huge parking lot? I can't wrap my head around what's going wrong in this scenario.
This wasn't a fluke. I reliably get told that this is the best way to the park. If gmaps can be this wildly wrong in the middle of Fremont CA then I can only imagine how bad it gets in rural areas.