Hello, fellow road contributors, TRAC and TORM participants,
@PrasadVR and @MortenCopenhagen met in Visakhapatnam on December 10, 2025, to exchange road drawing experiences and discuss how this can become a more pleasant experience.
We feel Google Maps has been incredibly successful in encouraging users to post photos and reviews, but more roads around the world still need to be found and added to Google Maps. Creating Road Mapper was clearly a step in the right direction, but there are still some significant challenges to address.
So in this post, we are presenting a series of 14 potential improvements to drawing roads. We hope our fellow road nerds will help prioritize these from a road contributor’s point of view. You can do so by grading each of the 14 suggestions below.
So, in this post, we want you, as an active road contributor, to prioritize each of the 14 proposals below. We respectfully request that Local Guides with fewer than 100 approved roads on Google Maps not vote in this survey.
Please avoid giving the same grade repeatedly. Some suggestions must be more important than others 
1: Better guidance
We request more detailed guidance from Google on how best to add and edit roads to ensure a higher approval rate. Currently, we have to rely on guessing and learning by doing, which is hampered by delayed approvals, low approval rates, and difficulties in tracking our road edits. The TRAC community would be happy to collaborate on this. Sample clarifications needed include:
How to deal with trees and shadows over roads.
Clarification on optimal road length and number of turns in one road edit.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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2. Faster approvals
We see too many road edits expire after 90 days and much longer delays during road drawing campaigns. We also saw delays during the latest Road Mapper campaign. We request the necessary resources be allocated to ensure a faster turnaround on all road edits. Delayed approvals interfere with our ability to learn from the outcome of our edits. Motivation depends a lot on this. Both for campaign organizers and the participants.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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3. Higher approval rates
In Road Mapper the approval rates are close to 100 percent. In Google Maps the situation is a lot worse. Most road editors achieve approval rates as low as 5%, whereas highly experienced road editors may get 50-60% approval. To attain a high approval rate, we need to avoid drawing roads under trees and shadows, despite the roads being obviously there. We request that the AI approving roads be better trained and/or experienced road editors be given more trust.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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4. Shortcut to open the Road Editor more quickly
It takes too many clicks to open the Road Editor on computers - also when using right-click followed Report a data problem.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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5. Retain focus after submitting a road edit
When you open the Road Editor and need to move far from the starting position to find a missing road, the focus will shift back to the starting position. We request the focus not jump back so we can continue adding roads in the newly found area.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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6. Pending roads should also be shown on mobile devices.
We highly appreciate the feature showing pending roads on computers. We wish this could be extended to the mobile platform.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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7. Retain zoom level and map excerpt
When opening the road editor, the zoom level and location often shift, making it unnecessarily cumbersome to refind the exact place to suggest a road edit.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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8: Email notification should again contain a link to where the roads were drawn
Email notifications of approved road edits now contain a link to our list of all kinds of edits rather than a Maps link to the relevant place where the road was drawn. This hinders our options to study and learn from our road efforts.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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9: Better filtering of edits to show pending and approved road edits
Dedicated road contributors regret the decision to no longer have approved road edits jump to the top of our edit contribution lists. But it would be even better if we could have a tool to filter and show both pending and approved road edits. This would hugely improve our learning opportunities. It does not necessarily need to be a feature built into Google Maps. A separate API-based service would work as well.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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10. Participation of a road team representative in bimonthly virtual meetings with volunteer road contributors
We request virtual bi-monthly participation from someone on the team to informally interact with us to ensure our issues are heard and guidance can be shared where solutions already exist. Listening to users is always good practice. A physical meet-up could also serve as a huge motivator, attract more road contributors, and serve as a thank you to productive volunteers. The event programming could be masterfully focused compared to Connect Live, where all kinds of topics are discussed.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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11. More live contribution metrics related to roads
In the monthly and weekly praise emails, stats related to roads could be included. We would love to also see metrics on pending roads, please. Could we have a Road Mapper-style streak graph for roads drawn in Google Maps?
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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12. More Connect appraisal to Road contributors
Could the existing Road Mapping Champion badge be developed into a standard 3-level badge like for other Connect badges? We would also like clarification on the current criteria for awarding the “Road Mapping Champion” badge on Connect.
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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13. Longer timeout for pending road edits
Could the timeout for pending roads, now at 3 months, be extended to 12 months? This is less relevant if the approval times are fixed (see proposal #2)
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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14. Local Guides points for Road Mapper contributions
Could completed Road Mapper challenges be added under Approved roads on the detailed contribution stats page and consequently LG points given?
On a scale from 1 to 10, please indicate how urgent you find the above proposal. 10 being super important.
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We hope to discuss these proposals on tomorrows TRAC virtual meeting, so we ould approciate you taking the time to read and vote on these proposals prior to the virtual meet-up.
Thanks so much.
Prasad and Morten
