Problem with roads adding

Google Maps tips & tricks
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Hello, everyone!

It has been a great pleasure that Google finally added pending roads to the Google Maps editor.

I can edit roads much faster now (Google already approved about 1040 roads that I have drawn).

But there is a new problem and I think Google needs to clear it somehow

because the way the road adding works now is unpredictable.

First of all, I still don’t understand at what moment Google decides to mark the road as pending,

there have been numerous cases when I pushed the button Submit and a bunch of the roads that I have

drawn just never showed up on the map, even in pending status. I redrawn the roads again next day or

immediately and Google started to show them in pending status. It is like, I have to do work twice, and I

don’t understand why Google makes me spend my time for that.

The second problem is the speed. I have a very powerful PC, 32 GB RAM, i7, SSD, and high-end video card,

but when I start to draw roads, in 15-20 minutes everything gets so slow that even powerful games can’t make

my PC so stubborn. I think Google could easily improve the algorithms for that and make the experience much

more enjoyable.

Also, I think it would be a cool idea if Google started to send invites for Road Mapper to people who have drawn

a certain number of roads. I asked for access almost 5-6 months ago, but even with level 9 and a bunch of edits

did not get it, and it is very frustrating.

Oh, and I think it would be very nice if we got an official FAQ for road mapping. I mean the criteria that Google uses

when it decides what roads it will add. Coz I had a bunch of cases when I removed true garbage roads from Google

Maps, redrawn actual ones and suddenly google left old ones and did not accept mine. I think Google understands,

how consuming the process of adding roads can be and that one road can take about 4-5 minutes sometimes to draw,

why in this case doesn’t make a new status for roads, that actually exist but Google can’t add them according to some

reasons. In this case, people editing road maps could see that someone already tried to add the road and that it was not

accepted, and the reason why it did not happen. In this case, people would not do the same work over and over.

Sincerely, slightly upset but dedicated contributor.

9 Likes
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Hi @AnoshkoAlexey ,

Glad to see more people adding roads nowadays just like yourself.

I would like to tag a fellow TRAC contributor @MarcoDavoli that could maybe point your in the right direction regarding your hardware problem. I do not have this kind of problem even after adding roads for multiple hours and have never heard about it. Maybe correlates to Chrome snowballing RAM usage? You probably need to get more specific and add some data of what’s happening to your PC after those 15-20 minutes of contributing.

Regarding Road Mapper - even I didn’t get an invitation email for the last 6 months. And I know for a fact that I my email address has been submitted by multiple users.

We are all hoping for more updates and improvements, believe me. What took us all by surprise was the orange dotted lines that are great, but again need improvements. They aren’t showing on mobile and aren’t intertwined with the ones from PC.

Anyways hopefully Marco can help you out.

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Ciao @AnoshkoAlexey ,

thank you for sharing your experience with the Google Maps editor. It’s great to hear that you have contributed to over 1046 roads! Great start !

Regarding the issues you mentioned, I understand the frustration caused by the unpredictability in marking roads as pending and the slowness of the system despite your high-end hardware.

About the “slowness” of the system; I’m working on a MacMini M2 Pro with 32Gb RAM (think is a quit fast machine) using Chrome as preferred browser. I noticed that, after the introduction of the “Orange dotted lines” all become slower. But not only. While I’m drawing in a really chaotic environment like in and area with lots of white roads and many orange dotted lines all the process become more slow. Maybe, like our fellow @Lukas_1 mentioned before, could be a problem of memory management by chrome. Maybe, I’m not a tech guy able to understand. As soon as possibile, according to our friend “Ooops Error” I’ll start to work with Edge browser to see how is going.

“Ooops Error” is actually my main issue: I’m daily recording all my activity and, based on two months of activity, I can tell you that I’m NOT ABLE to work for more than 1 hour; than I’m stopped by this unpredictable error.

About the “Orange dotte lines” yesterday, after talking with @Lukas_1 , and during my forced pause due to this error, I switched to iPad for continuing darwing my roads. YES, strange but I can work on mobile but not on desktop.

I have created some new roads and, this morning, I saw them using my desktop.

About FAQ, actually all my knowledge comes from here, from LGC and from many friends that are happy to share their experience with valuable hints. Like this important post made by @ErmesT (ciao Ermes, oggi riprendo le attività e risponderò al tuo illuminante post. Come sempre grazie del tuo) that I invite you to read tempo.

I do understand hen you say “slightly upset but dedicated contributor.” but keep up your fantastic work with Google Maps. Your dedication not only improves the application for all users but also helps to build a more informed and connected community.

And finally, but not least, I encourage you to follow the various posts with title / subject ‘TRAC’ written by our friend @SholaIB . There will soon be a new campaign on road creation.

Take care and enjoy the new year’s day

Ciao

Marco

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Thank you for your responses, @Lukas_1 and @MarcoDavoli !

I use a fresh version of Chrome every time I edit or add roads.

The thing that I’ve noticed is the level of lag is different for adding and editing. For example, if I added new roads before the lag started, I could switch and start to edit roads and the lag would be much less for editing, than for adding, and vice versa. Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes free space on my disk decreases drastically when I work with roads, like gigabytes of memory can become busy, but again this does not happen every time.

Also, I don’t completely understand how does work the Submit button, because there is no progress bar, and sometimes for almost the same amount of edited/added roads the submitting process can take from a few seconds up to a few minutes. Does Google check some submitted roads right after I push the submit button or does it happen already when all data gets to the server? Another thing that I don’t understand, can I switch to another browser page, while data is being sent, because sometimes I get a pop-up window that the process takes too much time with a button “wait”, and I suppose that Google can drop the connection and just show me window, that data is being sent.

I am okay to wait for Road Mapper and for me that’s more than enough to edit and add roads on Google Maps, I just want them to work more stable and I want to be sure all my edits at least get to the server.

Yes, I love the status of the pending roads, it was a big improvement, coz before I felt “blind”. But yes, they freeze the process very drastically when there are a lot of changes in one area. I wish I could see the pending status of other users, so I would not waste time to redraw the same road, which in some cases Google will not accept for both of us.

I use Windows 11 or sometimes Ubuntu, but the problem persists in both systems. And, “Ooops Error” appears more frequently after the pending status was added, I got it about 10 times for all time (about 7-10 hours of work were lost).

I’ve read the post, and it was very useful, but what I’ve meant is something more detailed and official, like where Google specialists, better the ones who check the roads could do a big list with references and concrete examples. For example, a part of a highway road and how they would see us edit that in an ideal situation, so we could better understand the reasons why some roads are not being accepted.

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Grazie per il tag, @MarcoDavoli , sono stato molto occupato anche io, ma sto cercando di rientrare in attività :wink: .

Hi @AnoshkoAlexey

Indeed a lot of questions, and of course we don’t have an answer for all the questions.

I fully agree that it would be great to have a clear “official” guideline, but honestly I think we will have to wait more time. In fact the road editor is in a constant evolution, and with the transition to a preliminary approval made by an AI I had to change my way to add roads.

Due to a lack of an official guideline I did my best to track the changes and to write some posts for updating the situation about best way to add approved roads.

I am trying to understand if something happened recently, because right now I’m having an impressive amount of approved roads. I was trying to reach 15K before the end of the year, and right now I am surprisingly very close to 17K.

The slowness of the editor seems to be related to the amount of pending edits “cached” in our memory when we use the editor. We have escalated the issue, that seems to be in some way linked to the infamous “Oops error”. My feeling is that Google didn’t considered the option of having some so active contributor, and that they should improve the allocation and usage of the memory of the editor.

Road Mapper. I have nearly 10k Kilometres added with that program, and I can say that it was a great training about adding roads.

However it is limited to only a few countries (listed in the post linked by you and Marco) and the selection of the quadrant where to contribute is made by the AI.

It means that you can’t choose “where exactly” to contribute. Road Mapper have some feature that I love and I would like to see also in the Road Editor for desktop, like the possibility of selecting and moving a group of segments all together, but due to the different method of approval I doubt it will be implemented on the editor.

If you want a list of my posts about editing roads please let me know.

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Hello, @ErmesT !

Yes, I’ve noticed about 3 months ago this change too. A lot more roads were approved than before, maybe 30-50 % more in my case and it was a really great surprise.

Thank you for sharing the posts, they were interesting to read!