Hi,
I’m looking for information on the new Road Mapper desktop application.
Can anyone advise the countries/areas it’s currently available in, along with any information on where this feature might be rolled out to in the future? The current information states “Africa, Asia, South America, and more!” ← it’s the “and more” I’d like more information about.
What are the requirements to have access to Road Mapper?
Thank you.
@MapWrangler As per knowledge, this is not yet available to the public. This is still in the development process and only a group of select local guides/mappers have been selected to test this app.
There are no known requirements to get access to Road Mapper. What I can say that previous history in developing Maps may have been a key qualification to be selected.
Thank you anyway for sharing the link. Because I knew about it but didn’t know the address of the app. 
Yes, everything you said is information available at the link I posted, or in available announcements.
“this is not yet available to the public.”
“This is still in the development process and only a group of select local guides/mappers have been selected to test this app.”
“previous history in developing Maps may have been a key qualification to be selected.”
My questions concern new information. For example, in addition to the questions asked in my initial post, it’s stated: “Add missing roads anywhere that can be driven by a car, truck, or two-wheeler.” Trucks are currently, specifically, excluded from Maps - worldwide. Will there be additions to road priorities and types? How will trucks be defined? … and more ; )
Thank you.
@MapWrangler I commented without reading the page though
Nobody is going to share more than this as everyone has signed NDA
It seems that this product is kind of different. The main purpose of this app is to develop a road network of the areas where Google Maps lack in roads. Not like the Maps Makers and current Google Maps where we add roads from our local knowledge. Thie app wants us to draw a map using satellite images only.
I’d love to test this out 
@SaifIS ,
“I commented without reading the page”
wow!
“Thie app wants us to draw a map using satellite images only”
That’s also what the page you didn’t read says. 
@MapWrangler I did read the page this time 
Hi @MapWrangler
Good news
I don’t have information but I like to participate in this good activity to complete and make Google Maps be a better place
@MapWrangler - I’m one of the people selected for early access to this tool and have been using it since early March.
To be honest all of the information on https://maps.google.com/roadmapper/about covers it so I don’t think anything I’m saying here is in breach of an NDA - there’s nothing much to it, a Waze map editor style line drawing exercise to add unmapped roads over the top of Satellite images. It’s incredibly basic currently with none of the nice tools Waze offer but maybe that will come in time.
I’m not sure how many others are on the program but I occasionally see other roads drawn by users so it’s definitely out there and mapped roads are being approved and going on to live maps at a fairly rapid rate. You are “assigned” a small square that’s a “challenge”, you map it and then submit to get another one.
It’s limited to Venezuela, Myanmar and Ethiopia currently but I presume this will expand in time. Very tricky to pick out roads on some of the terrain offered up for editing.
I’ve been a Waze user since the days before they even had a base map to work from and continue to edit Waze maps, I presume this was one of the criteria they looked at when looking for willing Local Guides to help test this.
There’s no points scoring, badges and most definitely no piles of socks at my door, just a basic results dashboard and a sense you’re helping.
Hope this helps.
Hello @turbotapeworm ,
Sorry for the belated reply and a tremendous Thank you! for the information and experience you shared! - - I have no doubt many users/Local Guides found it valuable.
“Very tricky to pick out roads on some of the terrain offered up for editing.”
Is it sometimes difficult/tricky to determine what is a (bona fide) ‘road’ vs what is, say, a “tractor road” or an “agricultural road”, etc. or what may be just a “road” used, say on private property (farm, ranch, etc.)?
I noted in the announcement information that the road drawing was to be for anything that could be used by a car, truck or handcart… Are you adding road priorities and types (conditions) to the edits/drawings – or do you know if that’s being done? (A road priority/type for ‘truck’ would be new, AFAIK, to Maps.)
“There’s no points scoring, badges and most definitely no piles of socks at my door, just a basic results dashboard and a sense you’re helping.”
Personally ; ) I think that’s a good thing – I trust the results dashboard provides you with a ‘benchmark’ record of what you’ve accomplished – like back in the days of MapMaker and in Waze where one can keep track of the number of miles/kilometers ‘paved’ ; )
What’s your shoe size? I’m 'gonna look into getting you a monogrammed pair of socks ; )
Thanks again!
A belated reply here too, I only just got a notification you’d replied
With regards to the difficulties in identifying roads it’s mainly down to the way some of the areas seem to have a mix of dry riverbeds / streams, well-trodden paths and dirt roads, often through trees or taking several routes to get to the same point. To the local people in some of these places they may well be roads used by cars but at the same time they could easily be a road through an area of farmland that’s used by a tractor on a regular basis. There’s also the time-old issue of mapping from satellite images where you kind of think there must be a road between several buildings but trees are in the way so you might not get it 100% first time.
Because you only see your “challenge square” and a bit of the surrounding area you can’t always make a judgement based on the path of a road that’s more obvious.
At this point my focus is on the roads that are clearly taking people from one side of the map to the other as a bare minimum and then any connecting roads that appear to be well used and follow a strict path. It’s easy in some cases as they are obviously tarmac / asphalt but you just have to use your judgement. I think the important thing is to get the basics in place now to form the major routes, the detail and refinement can come later.
There’s no element of defining the types of roads at this point, for those of us testing at least, it’s just “here’s a road, it’s a line, it joins to this line” stuff. There isn’t really even the concept of junctions as far as I can tell, I presume Google will be able to work a lot of this out with GPS data and checking how objects interact with the roads or through recruiting local guides in these regions to help. One thing I have noted is that some people seem to be adding two roads running parallel to each other where there’s a major route with dirt between each side, I’m not doing this as I’m hoping at a later time you’ll be able to define the road by type and it will automatically map it like this.
I completely agree with you regarding the way the points are being handled, I like to see my own stats but don’t want to have them compared with others or have specific targets as this might encourage others to lower their standards in favour of just getting lines on the maps. There’s an approval phase but I don’t know if this has any human element to it. There’s some fairly low quality additions popping up but thankfully you can also modify other people’s lines if they haven’t been approved yet (I presume they aren’t approved anyway).
What’s nice is that when the roads are approved and added to maps you can see that people have already started to add places near to them or you’ve connected up some existing businesses so hopefully people can now navigate.
As you say it’s like Waze / MapMaker in that you see you’ve add XXXX km’s of road, in this case you get that broken down by number of “challenges” and per region as well as a guide to show how many days in row you’ve worked on it and how many meters or road you are adding per second.
It’s quite fun, pretty therapeutic and a great way to pass a bit of time, especially in these times when we aren’t supposed to be outside. Hopefully more people will be brought in soon.
Hi @MapWrangler ,
Thanks for your questions and for your interest in Road Mapper application.
We’re piloting the feature with a select number of Local Guides. This is currently a pilot program, but we’ll let the community know if we plan to expand it more broadly.
This is really amazing feature, especially for who contributed a lot to Map Maker like @MapWrangler and me.
I hope I have this opportunity to use it asap. I’m so eager.
If someone finishes a challenge and it approves for Maps will that Local Guide get points for the challenge like the one in normal road addition.
I would love to join Road Mapper
Of course you would love it.
@moaaxali it would appear there’s no points to be had from Mapper contributions.
The two programs don’t seem to be linked and there are no points awarded in Mapper, all you get is a dashboard to follow your progress, how many km’s of road added, how many challenges completed, how many days you’ve contributed etc.
Thanks!
What is my rank in Road mapper program ?
There are no ranks, it’s just a log of what you’ve done so you can try and achieve your own goals or do better than you did the last time you checked your stats.
Personally I found the program a little dull and riddled with annoyances to the point that I no longer use it. Had it linked in to Local Guides and had a badge or something equally meaningless I might still have felt the desire to chase some trinket.
I put in 1000km of road though so I feel like I’ve done my duty as a tester / AI trainer / unpaid helper and hope lots of other people sign up and use it in the future. I’d rather just have Map Maker back.
Major props to you for 1000km of roadmapping! That is a serious contribution!
I was invited in, maybe a month or so ago … and I do try to do something everyday. The biggest drawback for me is something you mentioned in an earlier post, “low-quality edits”. I scratch my head wondering why some of these edits are approved (which goes to another question relative to what’s the quality standard for Road Mapper?) I had the thought that maybe “Road Mapper” doesn’t want to discourage Local Guides from mapping by not approving their edits – but I gotta say, that cuts both ways - - as I’m now receiving quadrants with up to 75% or more of previous edits!
Now “why would that be”? /sarcasm It’s because, AFAIK the previous (existing) edits are of poor quality — they are wayyyy off the mark of the roads in aerial imagery; they are often mapped thru multiple buildings; they are often fragments, some of which are unconnected orphans.
So, although I, of course, “don’t know”, it appears that these poor quality edits are then presented to others (perhaps) with the thought that ‘we’ will fix them.
News Flash: at least for me, it takes me twice as long to make the corrections as it would for me to make the correct edit from scratch. So, at this point I just hit “Skip” – sometimes as many as 6-10 times to get a quadrant that doesn’t require correcting existing edits.
It’s an interesting situation. One could say that making corrections is part of the Road Mapper process. On the other hand, if the standards were higher, those low-quality edits wouldn’t be approved in the first place.