Google Maps
Google map mistakes - Google Maps

I am a 75 year old disabled vet in declining health and physical fitness.
I own a 5 acre parcel and a small house in Joshua Tree CA. It is about 1 ¾ miles from the main highway up gravel roads that are fairly well maintained by the property owners in the area.

If I am ever injured or suffer some major physical calamity like a heart attack or a life threatening injury, unless I am personally able to call for emergency assistance and tell the people how to find me, say I suffer a stroke and can dial but cannot speak, or if someone finds me and calls for help for me and I am unable to tell them what to tell the responders, I will probably die because there is no way whatsoever that anyone can find my property using Google Maps. If they use Yahoo Maps there is no problem, and if they use Mapquest there is no problem, but if they use Google Maps I’m a goner.

My street name does not appear on my road. It appears about a half mile away on another road to the southeast, and about a half mile north and a quarter mile east, but none of the roads that are wrongly named to be my road lead to my road. One of the main roads Hacienda in one direction that borders my property is correctly named, but it is not my road. My road is not named at all on Google Maps. The area around my property for a mile or so in every direction is largely dry floodwater runoff washes that become torrents after rains in the San Bernardino Mountains. One of these, a dry wash composed of numerous separate smaller dry washes, has the name of my road on it. It runs diagonally across my property, but not to my house. Any vehicle other than a rugged 4WD will immediately get stuck in the loose sand up to the axles.

This dry wash is named as mt road at one magnification (zoom) setting and at another zoom setting it is named my road part of the way and the other part is namde Hacienda, but again, it is not a road it is a dry wash.in several places a road wil change names right in the road at no geographic or man-made feature just an arbitrary point

Not only that but several other branches of the dry wash are also misnamed as Hacienda so that there are three different dry washes each bearing the name Hacienda so Google, that supposed paragon of technical superiority, has Hacienda actually intersecting with Hacienda and running parallel to Hacienda, and further turning and becoming Hacienda and crossing Hacienda again! But my road, “ (I’ll call it “Hidden Trail” is just that, - it remains unnamed its entire length.

If a person was able to go up Hacienda and follow it in one of its numerous incarnations, in fact the most prominent incarnation, and managed not to get stuck, they would drive right down the 100 foot length of the high tech septic system I installed last year, and wipe it out.

Back on Dec. 30 of Google had the map right. But sometime after that they changed map providers and it went crazy. I have been hounding Google for over a year to fix this dangerous error and they do nothing. When Tele-Atlas took over (and put in a really bad satellite photo in place of the very good photo that was there in 2007) I started communicating with them but still kept up with Google yet neither of them did a thing about it. It has been over a year.

Now suddenly Tele-Atlas tells me they corrected the map but they no longer supply map services to Google! What timing! So I sent a whole new round of complaints to the new provider and they have a link on the map in the lower right corner to “report a problem” and I made four reports over the past three days and I finally got four different “Case Number” notifications and when I opened them they each say they have nothing to do about it and I should contact Google. I have tried every conceivable way to get Google’s attention and I get nowhere. I have simply guessed at extension numbers (Google extension numbers have five numerals) and on several occasions I actually got a real person and I asked them to help and got nowhere. I called one of their regional branches and was given information I could use to talk to major department heads, and I did that and got the secretary of the Vice President for Products (only got her voice mail) and I left about ten messages on that line and nothing has happened. I actually got the extension number of one of the founders (not Brn or whatever his name is, but the other guy) but when you call it weird things happen but nothing useful.

I have threatened with legal action – nothing. I have complained about the fact that the meth heads out there (in abundance) could get caught on my property when I am not there and get out by saying “I was following the Google Map and it got me here, right on top of this septic system” Nothing happened from that approach.

These seems to be no way at all to get this scary mega-monster corporation to take responsibility for its actions. Or lack of action.

I use Google a lot and it is really useful, but I have to admit that I am beginning to become quite concerned about what the future may hold insofar as what this scary corporation might do.

Yeah, I know they try to put on a cutesy face with their cutesy different logos for various important times or dates, with decorations on the logo etc, but Nazi Germany was also quite good at putting on a face that attracted the masses.

I am very concerned now that I read that others have problems with them too. I am afraid that one day we will wake up to another New World, one we will suffer under.

It is like some science fiction or comic book evil empire.

Google - I could die from your imperious indifference to the possible consequences of your actions – rather, your inactions. I could suffer property damage, I could possibly suffer other as yet unknown consequences. Why do you think that you do not have to stop misnaming the roads around my house and why do you think its OK not to properly name my road? To not even name it at all?

If you look at the satellite photo with the roads overlay, but not the names on the roads, you can clearly see that the lighter colored or lighter shaded sinuous features that you identify as roads have little round or roundish dark spots in them but other light colored areas that are perfectly straight do not have dark spots in them. Can you possible deduce from that, that quite possibly the winding or sinuous things that are cluttered with dark spots are DRY WASHES while the strait areas with no dark spots in them are ROADS? Vegetation does not grow in roads and dry washes do not run in perfectly straight lines. But the map around my property is laden with roads choked with vegetation and dry washes that are straight as a ruler.

Cartographers you are not!!!

Please Google, do not be an instrument of my unnecessary demise!

Company: Google Maps
Country: USA

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