andrewlighten.com

I’m constantly dismayed at the quality of mapping data that’s available to the general public. I have no idea what’s available to those in the know (military, etc) but what we’re fed is pretty bad.

The Kid was trying to describe a park she wanted to visit today, so I bought up my default map of choice – Google maps. While we were looking, I noticed something odd. Maryborough Hospital is apparently run from someone’s house.

If we look at where Maryborough Hospital actually is, we find it’s actually labelled as “Maryborough Community Health”:

Also notice that the mapping resolution has dropped. There’s a huge gulf between the resolution in the west half of Maryborough and the east half:

Oh, and while I’m at it, notice how there’s a cemetery in the middle of that area of public parkland? Actually, there isn’t. The cemetery is about 5km south east of that — and it’s marked correctly, so we apparently have two cemeteries and a crematorium.

We’ve done some SES vertical rescue training in the parkland that cemetery is shown in, so I know there’s nothing there but scrub. It’s off the back of the Bristol Hill Tower carpark, as you can see if I zoom in closer:

EDIT: Brad Costelow has pointed out that there is actually a small cemetery in the bush there. I’ve never seen it, nor have I seen any signage for it. I’ll have to investigate further.

Next I looked at Microsoft Maps Live Maps Bing Maps to see if that was any better.

Nope. Epic fail. The map view shows no landmarks in Maryborough at all, and the satellite view is less than useful:

Ok, maybe Yahoo! is better? Let’s look using the highest resolution that they have for Maryborough:

I’m not sure that this is useful to anyone. With this lack of detail you might as well say “nah, sorry, can’t help” the way Bing Maps did.

So, in summary:

• Google is the best by far, but has the hospital in someone’s house and we have a second cemetery plus crematorium in the middle of the bush.
• Bing Maps fails totally.
• Yahoo! fails totally.

I know we’re just a piddling little country town, but really, is it that hard to get this stuff right?

As a final test I’ve looked at Google Earth. I figured it would use the same mapping data as Google Maps but possibly has different landmarks. I was right. The imagery has the same east/west difference in resolution, but the landmarks are very different.

Here’s a close up of the homes where Google Maps says the hospital is:

At least this time there’s no hospital marked there. The place where the actual hospital is shows up but at poor detail:

No landmark for the hospital, but at least one of the local restaurants is there. Kind of.