Suggest Places for Google Street View Trike

Google Street View is expanding to places when cars cannot go, like pedestrian malls, college campuses and bike trails, using a tricycle mounted video system. Google will be accepting suggestions for US locations until Wednesday October 28, 2009. The public will then be able to cast their final votes and choose the top locations Google will add to Street View. Any suggestions for Virginia?

Google Maps – Sleuthing Changes in Data Sources and Geocoding Methods

Google has caused a bit of a stir by dropping Tele Atlas as their US data provider and switching to their own, self-managed dataset. Google has caught some flack in the blogosphere for being less than transparent about their data sources and providing nothing even resembling metadata. Users must discover for themselves what and where is new. The road centerlines have changed, public parkland and campus maps have been added, and in some areas parcel lines are displayed. Also, Google has added a quick link for reporting user suggestions for error corrections and updates.

Looking at my neighborhood it appears that Google is using a mix of parcel addresses and route geocoding to locate addresses. In my area if you search for a correct parcel address the marker is placed within the parcel boundary, as in the first map example. There is an error here in Google Maps. The road marked Gardenwood Ln is actually my unnamed driveway and Gardenwood Ln is the private road to the east. If you search for a correct Gardenwood Ln address the marker is correctly placed within the proper parcel (the second map). However, if you search for a Gardenwood address which is not in the parcel data, the route geocoding places the marker on the incorrect Gardenwood Ln (i.e. my driveway on the third map).

The Gardenwood Ln error seems to have come from the US Census Tiger Data, suggesting Google is using TIGER data as a source, at least for Albemarle. (OpenStreetMap, which uses TIGER data has the same error.) Albemarle County GDS and the VGIN RCL datasets both have the correct Gardenwood Ln. Presumably, Google is using Albemarle GDS parcel data for parcel lines and addresses. I have reported the error to Google but have not yet heard back. Is anyone else finding parcel lines in their locality? Is parcel information available? Comments welcome.

Google Maps Now Self-Manages Address Data, Allows Error Reporting

I saw this post on All Points Blog that Google had dropped Tele Atlas as its addressing data provider for the United States (but not elsewhere) and is now managing these data on its own. Checking out my "favorite" addresses I found some obvious changes. Address points now seem to be located on or near buildings in some areas. Some previous omissions and errors are now corrected. However some new errors were also found; my driveway for instance is incorrectly labeled with the name of the private road to the east. This gave me an opportunity to try another new Google Map feature, Report a Problem, which allows users to suggest edits or changes to their map data. I reported my driveway problem last night and I will let you know if and how it is resolved.