Hello road editing friends,
After spending the month of October drawing a lot of roads as part of the TORM campaign, I spent much of November drawing new roads in Google Maps using the road editor on desktop.
Some of my new roads on Google Maps are continuations of roads I drew in Road Mapper.
In this post I would like to share the outcome of my efforts. The main purpose is to draw attention to the very low approval rates of roads drawn in the road editor (not Road Mapper).
As of today, November 29th, I have submitted a total of 1803 new roads, while only 95 of these have been approved. This comes out to an approval rate of 5.27%.
More will undoubtedly be approved in the coming days and weeks, but I’m honestly disappointed. For every 20 roads I drew, only one got approved!
This is such a stark contrast to the approval rate on Road Mapper, where 100% of my challenges get approved.
This statistic is not based on a tracking of the individual roads. I’m just counting the email notifications in Gmail using search strings like these:
label:maps-roads after:2025/11/28 before:2025/11/29
label:maps-approved-rds after:2025/11/29 before:2025/11/30
The text after label: refers to the names of the folders where submitted and approved road edits get filtered into.
The blue bars in this graph below show how many roads I drew per day in the month of November. And the red line indicates how many got approved per day.
The next graph shows the same data in a different layout. Each day shows the roads drawn and approved on and before the date (accumulated values). Look how tiny the red bars are compared to the blue bars.
If Google would approve our new roads on the same day we draw them and the approval rate was 100%, then the red bars would be the same height as the blue bars.
I plan to update this post late in December, so we will see if and how much the approval rate will improve due to system delays.
For context, let me share a few examples of the kinds of road edits I made. I mainly draw roads in Africa (mostly in DR Congo and in Uganda).
Above is a plain realignment of a highway (roads drawn incorrectly). In my experience it is not worth our time to realign local roads.
I strive to draw roads that connect two existing roads. This increases the chances of approval.
Not all roads are a short line. Above is an example of a more complicated set of roads. I fear this one might not get approved.
Here is another example from a huge sugarcane farm. Sometimes I avoid connecting to existing roads when they are still pending.
I’m looking forward to reading your comments and suggestions. Maybe you have some tips on upping the approval rate of new roads.
Cheers
