It’s never easy to drive in a big city like Paris, New York or Casablanca, the trafic is just impossible. Last month I had a meeting with a client in the big city of Casablanca in Morocco, and as always, I used Google Maps to reach my destination. Normally the same distance should be made in less than 20 minutes, but it took 45 minutes to get to my destination, witch made me arrive very late to the meeting! When I explained to the my client that I used Google Maps to find their office, and that it drove me to their previous location, he snapped and yelled: “you should never use Google Maps, it’s never updated!”.
Here I understood that many people don’t know that Google maps, just like many other collaborative solutions, is mainly updated by the contribution of communities. The issue is that, since they moved to their new headquarters, people keep showing up late to their meetings. I explained to them that anyone can contribute to make the map more accurate and that even Google, NASA or the evil itself can not know every single change everywhere. I asked one of their team members to open Google Maps and suggest an edit for the new location. The update was approved quickly, and then they realized how Google Maps can be powerful if all of us contribute to make it more accurate.
Road transport is now the largest and growing source of CO2 emissions in Europe. My car’s emission is about 153 g/km (This number can vary based on a vehicle’s type, fuel economy, and the number of miles driven per year). So for this ride only, I’ve caused more than 765g of CO2, just because Google maps was not updated, but starting today, my contribution will save the planet a great deal of daily CO2 Emission.
Remember how many time you’ve updated an address on Google Maps, this will directly affect our footprint.
And YES , Local guides are every day helping the planet to be better.