First I have to say that my journey of adding roads on google maps was and still is tightly intertwined with the TRAC challenge.
Once upon a time on a cold April morning I was casually looking through the forum and stumbled upon a post from @SholaIB .
It was his 3Thousand roads add campaign 2023 TRAC challenge where he and anyone who joined would try and reach 3.000 added roads in total on google maps. I found it very interesting, but didn’t really give much attention to it at the time. But as it sometimes goes I soon realized that adding roads in places like Nigeria, Ghana, Kazakhstan or Jordan is needed and would be really helpful to anyone using google maps in those areas. So I started studying how to add roads on a phone and a desktop to draw them as accurately and close to reality as possible.
I got really excited when I could connect a village to an existing road or enlarge an urban area in a small Nigerian town. After that I wondered how many villages, towns and cities all around the globe are not yet connected and it brought me to further research.
This is when I applied to join the TRAC team and try to get some tips from more knowledgeable local guides. It was a whole new world and I got some pointers on where to add roads which was just superb.
One of the interesting things that caught my attention was the number of roads that other participants already had acquired. A few people had over 3.000 roads added to their name and that was such an unimaginable thing for me.
But I got to work and tried to do my best adding and fixing (this is a whole another chapter and it will take ages to repair everything all over the world) roads which was taking up at least an hour a day of my time. I didn’t stop there though.
By the time I was adding roads on the regular, we surpassed the 3.000 roads target and then it increased to 5 and then 10.000 roads. This was a huge step and I had to alter my road adding strategy to contribute to the count a bit more.
Let me explain - after every submission of a road you get 15 points. Of course that happens if you even manage to get it approved. That meant that now instead of adding 10s and 100s of roads at once I was now adding small clusters of roads from 1 to about 10. Even though this was very tedious it helped the count tremendously.
What also helped me with adding this huge amount of roads in not even 4 months was not having a job. I decided to quit my job because of its nature - long hours. My workaholic colleagues were also a big part of why I left. Nonetheless I had some money saved up and lots of free time ahead of me - so I used it. Each working day I spent about 3-6 hours creating roads and usually had some time off on the weekends.
By the end of May I already had about 1.500 roads approved and visible on my google account and our group’s goal increased to 50.000 roads.
Do not be fooled by the numbers. 1.500 approved roads doesn’t equal 1.500 added roads.
I kept track of every single day of email that I got from both the added roads and the approved ones.
What I found out was that you only get about 50% of all the roads you add approved. It was quite frustrating at first but you have to keep on going to reach your targets. During June and first half of July I was looking for work and still didn’t get an offer that would be a good match for me and therefore could keep up the pace on road adding.
With an average of 256 roads added and 125 approved roads each day in June, I was on the right track to climb to the top of the TRAC group leaderboard. And so I did.
Total count after June - 10.275 added roads and 5005 approved roads.
In July a very unpleasant thing happened to our top contributor @NareshDarji which scared all of us. He suddenly started to get his old pending roads rejected by the HUNDREDS and in the end got his account suspended for about 2 weeks from adding roads. Even after he got his account, he still couldn’t add any roads because they would just get rejected.
This led to almost everyone pulling back on their daily road adding and the count suffered. During this time myself and Naresh were neck and neck with our roads count at about 6 000 each. I thought - it does not make sense to stop adding roads because if the same thing happens to me as well I can’t really do anything about it. So I kept on going with an average of 242 added roads and 136 approved roads a day in the month of July, this was my most productive period.
Total count after July - 17.777 added roads and 9.242 approved roads.
Now, I finally got a new job that I started on the first of August and I did not have that much time to add roads anymore. Only chance I got was when I was on my phone in a few free moments of the day. That earned me at most 80 roads a day.
What pushed me over the magical number of 10.000 approved roads was the old pending roads that I added back in June and July. I still expect to be getting the approval emails and thus going even further.
Total count after reaching the goal in August - 18.098 added roads and 10.020 approved roads.
At the time of the publication of this post the TRAC team haven’t reached the goal of 50.000 roads yet but we keep on getting closer each and every day.
Because after all the whole group was doing this because we wanted to help people get places. We did what was in our power to make the maps a more user-friendly place and I think that’s what matters. Additionally a lot of us are interested in joining Road Mapper to be able to add roads all around the globe.
A Thank You to the TRAC team is an absolute must and I cannot thank you all enough for being so supportive to anyone that joined and will join in the future.
Now of course I need to rest a little bit before adding more roads since it does get challenging at times.
If you’re interested in looking through the data I collected each and every day aka manually counted all the “Thank you” emails - added roads and all the “Published” emails - approved roads, you can check out this spreadsheet.
I would also love to mention at least some of the people that helped me get to this point:
@Rakshi2
I appreciate each and every one of you.
If you got to the bottom of this, thank you for your time.
Lucas
