But we are actually mapping directly on Google Maps through Road Mapper! After approval there is a link to your Road Mapper roads live on Google Maps.
The difference is that in Road Mapper we are limited to rural areas only in countries that are not sharing road data from local authorities through the Geo Data partnership program.
Sometime I get this spooky feeling that Google might be testing me by showing the same challenge more than once to check if my road drawing efforts are consistent. My brain is quite good at remembering images, so I get the spooky feeling when I get a frame that looks very much like a frame i already drew roads in.
I know I’m probably overthinking this. But it would be a great way to test the precision and repeatability as a quality check on our efforts.
As a part of training it would be fantastic if we could emulate the Road Mapper and calculate how well we can reproduce our efforts and train how to consistently drawn roads between LGs.
I was also an avid Map Maker user, and I really miss the ability to add details like residential street names and house numbers. Also, whenever I discovered missing or incorrect roads in my own country, it was so easy to fix them. Google shut it down abruptly and told us a big lie that it was going to be relaunched, and there would be a Map Maker Regional Leads Program. Although there was some indication that it resumed briefly, my country was never reinstated, and I was never accepted as a Regional Lead. In the two present versions of mapping, my home country is not listed in Road Mapper, and there’s only a very slim chance of approval for anything I do in the Google Maps editor. (And yes, I do expect Road Mapper to come to the same unannounced end as Map Maker sometime).
Although TORM is easier than TRAC, it gets treated like a distant cousin. There’s a lot less mention of Road Mapper in the other 11 months, as compared to the higher profile accorded to the regular Google Maps editing. Maybe its because there are fewer participants, and no points earned towards our Maps profile.
When mapping a paved road with white dividing lines separating two-way traffic, I believe the vector line in Google Maps or Road Mapper should always be drawn directly along those center white lines. Aligning the trace precisely on the median line ensures the road path renders perfectly centered on the map layout.
If you are lucky that it is considered a highway which is colored light yellow on Google Maps, you can easily get more such edits approved in the Road Editor in Maps. Because having highways have priority in the long que of road edits.
Hi @MortenCopenhagen this post somehow slipped my attention , thanks to @khmansour1 for recommending this post in a comment.
Thank you @MortenCopenhagen for this meaningful post.You have expressed your thoughts so beautifully .
Your 10 reflections on road mapping completely resonated with me ,even i had same thoughts while drawing ,for eg. every hut i came across had a small adjacent hut nearby my thought at that point is " kitchen or washroom" i want to visit and ask villagers.Sometimes my thought is do i need to connect all huts together or just one entry is fine .
I completely agree with your thoughts here, many a time i keep figuring out the differences, and wish google would give us some clue.
One question that has been staying with me is to find, not accepted edits to figure out my mistake.That way i think we can help ourselves to some extent.
Absolutely Agree on this point.
However, there are long straight roads where you tend to create one long segment. I guess this happens when roaders zoom out and draw but when you zoom in, you see road edits that are non aligned or off track.
For this to work you must believe that Google knows better than us. Or the that their evaluation is correct!
I doubt that.
Most - if not all - approvals and rejections are done by AI and algorithms. They don’t know anything about the actual place on the ground. And there is certainly no Google staff with local knowledge.
So I doubt we can learn the “truth” from studying the rejected challenges.
But we can most likely learn what the automated system is looking for to decide what get approved and rejected.
I’m thinking that the purpose of Road Mapper is also to learn from us.
I’m sure they could learn a lot more if they would invite the active Road Mappers to develop a set of guidelines on what a road is.
