Ynt: Roads for Everyone - Helping others with the New Road Editor

[ErmesT]

No, @Gezendunyali , trust has nothing to do with road approval.

I will show you something. 3 roads, edited today, are already approved. I should be super trust, isn't it?

This is my edit tab in Maps in this very moment. As you can see, one road has been Not Applied

So there is no matter of trust. The verification process try to understand if your edit is acceptable, by comparing the stellite view with your edit, to see if what is visible can really be a road.

As @iliasJ said, sometimes it is not easy to understand if where the road is

You may be able to guess where the road is, between A and B, and if you zoom you can see the road C, but what about the tree roads in the red circle? We know the three roads are connected, but I would not be able to say "how", and I cannot say exactly "where" the roads are. Of course we can guess, but the AI will not accept something that cannot be conformed "visually".

I am quite sure @KarolinaPysz (she's the one who presented the Road Editor in the video shared in my post, and the one who is managing the Road Mapper board) can confirm this. This happen in Road Mapper too, and I am quite sure that if I had only 0.7 Km not approved in the last month, with a total of more than 230 KM added (99,7% of accuracy) it is not because I am trusted, but only because I try to avoid to "guess" where the road is

[ErmesT]

Thanks @YuliiaZa 

I've tried to share my best advice, hope this can help when the new feature will be available

[ErmesT]

Hope it will be available for you soon, @MortenCopenhagen 

It is a wonderful option for adding roads, if you prefer, like me, to use a desktop computer

[L-C]

Hello @ErmesT, and thank you for writing this guide. This is very interesting and useful.

I just have one question: it is possible to edit existing roads, for example to adjust them when they are misplaced or too much simplified? In Road Mapper it is possible to edit existing roads and I was wondering if this new tool was similar.

In you example I found a road nearby which is really poorly drawn and doesn't follow the actual road. This road is probably automatically generated by AI but the trees make it difficult to be detected by the algorithms. Street View broken blue lines are a good way to find incorrectly drawn roads: the pictures that make blue lines can only appear when attached to a road on the map. The gaps show where the road is misplaced:

With this tool would it be possible to edit the road shape to improve the map quality?

Thanks.

[ErmesT]

Hi @L-C , and thank you for asking

Unfortunately no, you cannot modify an existing road. The options that you have are the same available on the editor for mobile.

And I agree that the road is probably automatically generated, but I am not sure this is the only reason for the incorrect Street View data.

As far as I can see they are replacing the old street view from 2011 with the now one, recorded just a few days ago.

But I will keep an eye in the next few days, to see if the situation is changing.

Reporting in that way is not efficient, and I agree that it would be better so be able to move the road in the right position

[HsRawal]

Thanks @ErmesT  for detailed information about upcoming "Road editor" but still not yet available in my account. I am also active in "Road Mapper". According to the information given by you, it looks very similar to what we saw in Google Map Maker. I remember very well that earlier road edits used to get approved within 3-4 days after editing but when your trust level increased then road edit used to auto approve itself. Also, there was an elastic mode in Google Map Maker to align the road. There also much more option like road type (National Highway, State Highway, Major Road, Minor Road, Speed limit and road condition etc.). Hope we will enjoy the new feature in Google Map early in new year.

Regards

[ErmesT]

I don't think I will go back to map maker, @HsRawal . The program was beautiful but many abused of the possibility to add everything in Maps.

The actual program has the same functions available on mobile, but with the possibility to manage it easily, thanks to a big screen and a mouse.

Also the verification seems not to be related to a trusted level, but to a real "verification". One of my road (I had 154 roads approved in the last months, and  35 pending edits) was in fact "not applied"

In fact it makes sense, because in Road Mapper the AI is learning from us how to understand where a road is. Or maybe our trusted level is associated with our accuracy in Road Mapper (mine is 99,7 %).

Hope it will be available soon for everyone. The system is not perfect, but it is indeed very useful

[L-C]

Thank you for your answer @ErmesT. Well I was hoping it would let us adjust existing roads as it is sometimes needed when adding new roads. A bit disappointing. Still going to be useful to add roads but I hope Google will add this ability like in Road Mapper.

@HsRawal I agree Map Maker was an awesome tool. It was so sad to see it going away back in time.

Indeed this tool was abused by a few people (who remembers the Android robot doing some nasty thing over an Apple logo?) but this shouldn't be an excuse to remove it.

[LaloPadilla]

Thanks for sharing how the road editor for desktop looks @ErmesT. I can't wait to be able to use it, I started adding roads last year , and it has become one of my favourite type of contributions, using the app is really slow and not so fun when you try to add detailed roads (with many curves) and sometimes it doesn't allows you to add multiple roads at the same time, the good part is that the time it takes to get approved has decreased a lot.

The story of the small hotel, that can only be reached climbing 😂, is a great example of the impact of this editing tool, let's improve the map!

[iliasJ]

Bonjour @ErmesT , je me suis demander si je pouvais refaire une modification pour les routes "Non Approuvées ?"