Ian Leader: And so they should, as they own Tele Atlas. Here in Zurich, we’ve been frustrated that the Uetliberg tunnel, a major new bypass many years in the making was opened in May 2009, but in mid-August, Google maps still doesn’t show it as a road (although you can see the entrance road-works in the satellite view here)
Tom Tom recently launched a free on-line maps / navigation service, and though overall Google maps is slicker and faster (you can’t drag the route around like you can on Google maps), Tom Tom has better map data. The following screenshot shows the same area, with part of a planned route entering the tunnel:
Although I’m very happy with my Go 910, In the past I felt that Tom Tom weren’t taking great advantage of the internet, cloud-sourcing or their ownership of Tele Atlas. On the back of innovations such as crowd-sourcing of map corrections and journey times, this latest development suggests that’s no longer the case. How long till we get the TomTom smartphone…
Update (23-Oct-09): The Uetliberg tunnel appeared on Google maps a few weeks ago, and Google have now opted for crowdsourcing for street data in the US instead of buying it from TeleAtlas. But the really clever trick would be to take existing established data sources (like TA) and augment with their own crowdsourced data…
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Here is the US, Google has created their own base data with Streetview, parcel data and public domain data and is using crowd sourcing to fix and improve that data. Over here, TeleAtlas data has not been very good so Google had a strong motivation to replace it with their own.
Even with this major change in base data and the move to more active crowd sourcing, the complaints have been minimal and the repairs very quick. In a recent case of “bad data” where the town of Sunrise, Fl “went missing” after the change, it was completely repaired within 72 hours of Google being notified.