Apple Maps, Google maps, Honda Nav, and Waze don’t use that street, but Sygic will. So, I apologize to the riders that come to visit.
Different cartography organizations use different strategies for collecting map data, and each strategy has both advantages and disadvantages. Here's a quick overview of the concepts:
Waze, Google & TomTom use "crowd-sourced" data to update their cartography. When you drive with these applications active, they return your travel path and some characteristics associated with your travel history (for example, your speed along roadway segments) to central servers. The servers then use that information to create and display traffic flow information. In addition to that, longer-term automated analysis of travel patterns reveals changes to road layouts - detours, new roundabouts created, identification of dead-end roads and road closures, and so forth - that are then automatically incorporated into the cartography on a daily basis. Hence these maps tend to be more up-to-date, but the downside is that you need a data connection (cell phone connection) when driving to use them, and there are costs associated with transmitting and receiving that data in real time.
OSM (Open Street Maps) also uses crowd-sourced data, but not data sourced in real time. Numerous volunteer contributors document the presence and pathways of roads, and this information is added to future releases. John mentioned that OSM maps generally don't have speed limit data - this is because the volunteer contributors don't know how to add
road attributes to the new roadways that they create. To a certain extent, that's a good thing, because although everyone can see the roadways present on OSM and decide for themselves if that information is credible, it is not possible for end users to view and verify road attributes.
Proprietary cartography companies (HERE, TeleAtlas, etc.) collect their own road and road attribute data by a variety of means - driving the roads, air photo interpretation, sourcing data from governments - and they add road attributes to that data. These organizations typically release new map versions quarterly or twice a year (sometimes only annually for OEM subscribers, such as auto manufacturers). The weak point in this model is that if there is an error in the database (a wrongly characterized road, such as a dirt road identified as paved), or
a careless error in joining map segments that results in a break in a roadway, that error hangs around until the next release of an update, assuming someone reports it to the cartography provider. If no-one reports it, the error hangs around forever.
It's not possible to say "this one method is the best". It's a horses-for-courses kind of decision. For urban riding in heavily populated areas of developed countries, the Waze, Google, & TomTom model works best because it provides rapid traffic & detour updates. For rural riding where the user doesn't want to use a cell phone connection, the proprietary maps stored within the device (HERE, TeleAtlas, etc., such as Garmin and automotive OEMs use) are probably best. For serious off-road riding in remote areas, OSM maps that have been created by enthusiasts who have been there and done that are probably most accurate.
For what it's worth, here in Tunisia, I'm using TomTom maps offline (no data connection). The country has great cell coverage (4G everywhere), but it's pointless to waste the data connecting because none of the locals use TomTom maps, hence, there is no data returned to update the maps. If I had a dirt bike and wanted to venture out into the desert, I'd switch over to OSM maps created by dirt bike riders, because the "commercial" maps have no coverage at all of off-road tracks or trails.
Michael
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