One of the most dedicated local guides when it comes to cleaning the map (as you can see for yourself in the original #LGCTM post) is no doubt @MortenCopenhagen . In one of the comments on a recent post about spam fighting he mentioned finding strange uses of the category Bus station for places on Maps, which obviously sparkeld my interest, as I had not noticed anything like that in my area - yet.
When I did a targeted search, however, (using the search term “busstation” with Maps set to English) I did come across some unexpected results. A bunch of the search results were bus stops near me (on locations where I indeed know from personal experience to be a bus stop) correctly categorized as Bus stop. Others were categorized as Bus station and although some of them had a street name as POI (point of interest) name and were on locations where I know to be a bus stop, others had names that sound like regular POIs and were located on places where I definitely know there is NO bus stop.
Some examples are a doctor’s office and an insurance agency (you can check the Street View footage to see that there is no bus stop near those 2). And most of those odd listings also have a telephone number added to them and some also a website - with information that matches the POI mentioned in the place name. Pretty weird, if you ask me. But as I can’t think of any reason why this would be done on purpose to somehow mislead users of Google Maps (as spammers love to do), I guess it will rather be some accidental process that caused this situation.
Another weird thing in this respect is also the fact that the catgories Bus stop and Bus station are not available for use by local guides, since they belong to the so-called transit layer. On that layer info can only be added as the result of a cooperation between Google and the company or organisation offering the transportation services (which explains why e.g. info about the bus schedule can be included). So how can those POIs be on the map with that category? Perhaps this is another remnant of the “old days” when local guides could still make a wider variety of edits?
Anyway, I would now kindly ask you, dear reader, to check out the area near you to see if you can spot similar examples to the ones found in Denmark (by Morten) and Belgium (by me). Do let us know in the comment, as more examples might help us unravel the mystery!
Thanks ever so much for that historical insight @Amiran . I’ve tried to edit one of them to apply the appropriate category, but that suggested edit is pending now… Wait and see (as is often the case )
I made short comments on all of them. And I noticed that none of them have any photos beyond Google street view. And most if not all are listed in national business directories.
A solution could be to allow local guides to get suggested edits approved if the bus stops are not managed via a content partnership with Google Maps. I noticed that Bus stop and Busterminal are no longer available as a category for Maps users to select.
The list currently holds 16 places that I have come across while contributing to the Local Guides Clean The Map-project. I found it impossible to get needed edits to these places approved.
I hope @Giu_DiB or another Google Moderator will take a look at this.
Nothing seems to be done to fix the Busterminal problem. I still find several places incorrectly labeled as bus stops even though the name clearly states this is a form of a cooperative housing association. And I keep adding them to the list, mentioned above. The list keeps growing. As of now, there are 266 places on the list.
To assist who will try to fix this I now have an update that might be helpful to the investigation.
In the past 2 days, I have come across 3 such cooperative housing association that was on my list, but no longer is categorized as bus stops. So in my eyes, the random changing of places to be bus stops is not irreversible. They stop being bus stops without getting a new category. I don’t think this can be done by anyone except staff and “the system”.
Kindly remind the relevant team.
Cheers
Morten
Let me add: I suspect there is something systematically wrong since changing these seldomly visited places should not have the bus stop category. It is too random to be an act of ill-minded Maps users.
Our teams confirmed that the incorrect “Bus station” category has been removed for all the places in the Google Maps list you shared. Thank you again for reporting this!
I have now spend 2+ hours cleaning out all the places relrased from the buscategory. Thanks for fixing them. So nice to see things getting fixed.
I had mistakenly also added some real bus stops, but I now took them out of the list.
There are currently 105 incorrectly categorized busstop remaining on the list. Out of the initial almost 300.
It could be that I added extra ones, but the fact that they are still there signales that what is causing random places to become busstops has probably not yet been eliminated.
Sorry, I could not just post a thank you note here
I’ll reach out to the team again, but due to the volume of places on the list, it may take some time for this to be resolved. Thanks for your understanding!
)
