(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively)
Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder to get bad data into maps, I wish they would respond to feedback faster, and I wish they would make their estimates for when changes go live more accurate (two weeks versus 24 hours).
I was driving around Vernon, BC a few weeks ago and I asked Google Maps for directions to 3207 30th Ave. It confidently told me where to go but luckily my passenger noticed that it was actually directing me to 3207 34th Ave, four blocks north. Well that’s odd.
A few days later my cousin asked me (as the ex-Google still-nerd member of the family) if I could help with a Google Maps issue. The problem was that the address 138 W 6th Ave in Vancouver was being mapped at a location 2.4 km (that’s 1.5 miles or 12 furlongs) away from the actual location.
I could visualize the absurdity of where it maps the W 6th Ave address by asking Google Maps for directions between 136 W 6th Ave and 138 W 6th Ave. These addresses are adjacent in real life, but Google Maps gave me this:
That’s a long walk to get to the building next door.
There’s another fun way to visualize this bug. Search for “Clark & Page Casting Studios” in Google Maps. Then copy its address, shown in Google Maps, to the clipboard and ask for directions to Clark & Page Casting Studios from its address. This should be a zero-meter walk, but of course it isn’t. Instead it is, no surprise, a 2.4 km walk from Clark & Page Casting Studios to its address. Fun!
Or this silliness. If you navigate from “138 W 6th Ave Unit 1B” to “138 W 6th Ave #2b” then it is, you guessed it, a 2.4 km walk.
This error was pointed out to me because apparently aspiring actors kept going to the wrong place and being late for their auditions. These mistakes have real-world consequences.
There are more
Finding one error is curious, but two suggests a pattern. I started browsing Google Maps looking for addresses that seemed out of place. I quickly found three more.
1951 W 19th Ave in Vancouver is mapped at a 2.1 km walk from where its address should logically be. It should be in the 1900 block of W 19th Ave but is instead placed ten blocks away by Google Maps:
1355 W 17th Ave, North Vancouver is a particularly odd case because it is mapped as being in the wrong city (in Vancouver instead of North Vancouver), but on the right street (W 17th Ave) but in the wrong block (the 900 block instead of the 1300 block). As it turns out W 17th Ave doesn’t actually exist in North Vancouver. What is going on?
Typos? Street View?
The answer might be typos. 138 W 6th Ave is being mapped at the location where I would expect to find 1038 W 16th Ave located – a pair of single-digit errors. This requires that somebody/something made two errors when entering the address for 1038 W 16th Ave. The problem with this explanation is that 1038 W 16th Ave doesn’t exist – I cycled over there to check and the addresses go straight from 1020 to 1040.
3207 30th Ave in Vernon got a 30 changed to a 34. Maybe that was a typo?
1951 W 19th Ave is mapped where I would expect to find 951 W 19th Ave. This is another single-digit error. This one is less harmful because (again, I cycled over to check) there is no 1951 W 19th Ave, and 1951 and 951 W 19th Ave both map to roughly the same place. If you ask for directions from 951 to 1951 W 19th Ave (which should be ten blocks) you get these 0.0 km directions:
1355 W 17th Ave, North Vancouver is harder to explain. It was mapped adjacent to 979 W 17th Ave, Vancouver. This error severely stretches the definition of “typo” since nothing but the street name is correct (Vancouver and North Vancouver are different cities, separated by Vancouver Harbour).
I also noticed an anomaly in 5 Montcalm St, Vancouver. This address is in the 1300 block of Montcalm so the address makes no sense. I visited this location as well and the building address is actually 1131 W 16th Ave (the house is on a corner) and there is a five on one of the doors on the Montcalm side. Further creeping around the house revealed that there are five units inside the house – the five is a unit number, not a street number! Now I started wondering if a person or AI had seen the five on the door on Montcalm St and assumed that it was an address.
Internals guesswork
The fact that Google Maps can have these errors – that apparently the mapped location of addresses need have no relationship to the layout of the city’s streets – makes it clear that Google Maps has no concept of how street addresses work. There are many rules for how most addresses work in Vancouver but Google Maps appears to have no knowledge of these rules.
It appears that there is an address database somewhere – created by Google Maps, or the cities in BC, or perhaps from Street View data. Somehow that database seems to allow addresses to be mapped to parcels of land and when the address of a parcel of land is entered (by a human being or an AI bot) the database software happily accepts any address and maps it to the parcel, with no sanity checks to make sure it makes sense. Possibly sanity checks that are needed include:
- Is the parcel in the geographical bounds of the city name entered?
- Is the parcel in the vicinity of the road name entered?
- Is the parcel in the correct hundred block for the road name entered?
These checks would detect all five of the errors that I found.
The hundred-block check only makes sense in some cities. In others it might be better to just do a comparison with nearby numbers, or perhaps skip that check completely. And there are enough weird addresses in the world that these checks probably just have to be a suggestion rather than a hard blocker.
Since there are apparently a lot of these bad addresses in the wild (my ability to find five errors in two cities this quickly suggests there must be many thousands) it seems that somebody needs to run a batch process over the database to find these errors – me scrolling through the map really doesn’t scale well.
While it seems clear that Google Maps uses an address database to map arbitrary addresses to parcels of land, it is also capable of guessing where an address would be if that address existed. That is, if I ask it to map the non-existent addresses 1953, 1955, 1957, 1959, and 1961 on W 19th Ave it places the address balloon in plausible locations, interpolating between 1947 and 1981 (the surrounding “real” addresses). This suggests that Google Maps has the knowledge and heuristics needed to correctly place 138 W 16th Ave, but this knowledge is then overridden by a database that contains errors. Fun!
Something new?
I talked to the business at 138 W 6th Ave and they said that these problems are new – starting around mid March. I don’t remember noticing this type of error before so it does seem like Google Maps might have just ingested a batch of bad data.
Attempted fixes
When I encountered the first two errors I confidently said that I’d use the Google Maps feedback tool to get the errors fixed. I’ve had good luck in the past with this. But this time my luck ran out.
I dutifully submitted feedback for “Wrong pin location or address”:
And I got an email the next day saying that my edit was accepted:
But it’s been 14 days and the address still maps incorrectly.
I had better luck with my edit to 3207 30th Ave that was accepted the same day. That fix actually went live sometime between April 17th and April 23rd. That is still nowhere near the promised 24-hour latency, but at least it showed up eventually. Maybe the 138 W 6th Ave edit will still go live?
Not all errors are equal
The first two errors that I found – 3207 30th Ave in Vernon and 138 W 6th Ave in Vancouver – are problematic because those addresses are real and Google Maps plots them incorrectly. This leads to people going to the wrong place.
The other errors are less important because they are non-existent addresses that are plotted in nonsensical places. This is mostly harmless.
Anybody else seeing this?
If you have noticed any similar anomalies then please share them in the comments.
If you work on Google Maps please reach out to me if you have any information that you can share. I’ve tried reaching out through some ex-coworker friends, but no luck so far.
Discussion
https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lnlwmoayks2s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788832
Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson 
For over a decade, Google Maps mapped a bunch of downtown Seattle buildings to downtown Kirkland right around Google offices/post office. I wondered if Google’s geo team worked there and somehow test data was leaking out. At the same time (2005? 2008? or so), we had a bunch of microcells on building 119 on the Microsoft campus, so you could have a cell phone from Denmark, Japan, or the UK and make calls without roaming. Good times.
I just looked, and it seems fixed.
maybe some cities are nicely structured, but others are often an utter nonsense
and add data gathered by google cars to the mix and you have a complete catastrophe, for example the building I live with belongs to the bigger street, but the main gate and entrance to the yard as well as the entrance to the building itself are from the smaller street, additionally across years the numbering plate was placed in different sides of the building leading to google cars picking it up from both sides, in effect half of the building resolves properly while the other one to an address that doesn’t even exist, it rarely leads to issues but if some system picks up the wrong address and then someone uses non-google navigation to get here they won’t make it because the address doesn’t exist, it works only when the whole process happens within google
and I’ve tried getting it fixed numerous times, but it seems they trust their OCR cars more than actual residents that have over a decade long history of living there tracked by their services, oh well
Just stop using them. Seriously. They don’t care about errors in their data and these mistakes will continue as flawed AI yields more flawed data. Use openstreetmaps or something else better than Google Maps.
I have a problem where people type my address into Google maps and it sends them to the other side of the next county, an hour away. It autocorrects <number> Rt 20A Bristol NY to <number> Rt 20A Perry NY. I had some po’ed people when I tried selling a car on FB marketplace.
Oh, and welcome back to the blog-o-sphere. Your readers have missed you (and understand your absence). Looking forward to more frequent posts.
Google Maps has issues understanding street layouts in other parts of the world as well. I know of a building somewhere in between Foo Street and Bar Street. Its official address is 69 Foo Street. Google has an address point for 69 Foo Street, and another one for 69 Bar Street right next to it, even though Bar Street ends around number 20. (All addresses fictional. Numbering in Europe typically starts at 1 on one side of the street, 2 on the other, and increments by 2.)
Google Maps has had a vandalised name for the main railway station in Wrocław for a few months now. I reported it many times, I’ve seen people online campaign for reporting it, it’s still there.
There were four extensions to the tram network in Wrocław recently: Hubska (2019), Marchijska (2021), Popowice (May 2023), Nowy Dwór (September 2023). Google Maps shows the tram tracks only for one of them (Marchijska). For the remaining ones, the stops exist on Google Maps, and it can plan a route with trams going through there, but apparently, they are magic trams which do not need tracks to operate. Marchijska is also used by buses, and the route drawn by Google Maps involves driving around in circles, because Google does not know it can route buses through a car-inaccessible road.
Google Maps is fine when searching for businesses, but it is absolutely untrustworthy when searching for addresses, especially in more complicated or newly built locations.
I had a similar problem: My house address was mapped some 150m from where I actually live (on the garage of a church 😂). I live in number 86, and it was mapped opposite to number 85, which usually make sense (As somebody mentioned above, in Europe the numbers are odd and even on opposite sides of the street). The problem is that on the right side of the street there are more houses (many row homes orthogonal to the street actually), thus the numbers increase quicker, where on the left side there are vast gaps.
Not only that, but my address seemed to be a different entry type than for instance 88 or 84 (which didn’t have the problem), as if it were a business entry of sorts. I filed quite many correction requests, but it took them years to correct it.
Reading all these comments gives me heartburn; I worked in US GEO for Microsoft (all of the mapping products drew from our data, like MapPoint and Streets & Trips) and we had actual cartographers and remote sensing people on our teams to ensure data quality.
Even if you knew data was wrong, you had to find a dataset to get it fixed. We could not change data by assertion.
Seems like a flaw in the system. You should be able to assert a (probably temporary) exception to the published data, while getting the upstream fixed gets chased.
The point of the map is to show you where things are, not to flawlessly display a data set.
About Google Maps, I recently used it on holiday in Madeira. It was largely OK but made some really unhelpful mistakes that were luckily so egregious that it was obviously wrong. There were:
Keep in mind, we were publishing projects on CD and DVD, not online, and our lead times from data ingress to publication was years, not quarters.
But I agree. We would tag stuff, but it might take years before a new dataset came in, was normalized, and then the tags were evaluated.
There are errors in Google Maps for multiple locations in the Salt Lake valley. They’ve been the subject of a few local news stories: