Google Maps just fucking SUCKS now

[Roadrunner75]

It looks like "Lite" mode is no more.  My "Lite" links are dumping me now right into regular snail-slow Maps.  A quick search found a new "2D" mode option, but it was fairly slow as well.  Has anyone found a back door into "Lite" mode, just like we had to do awhile back for Classic Maps?

[jakeroot]

Didn't know Lite mode was still a thing. Thought they dumped it.

[Michael]

About a week ago, the words "Lite mode" disappeared, and scrolling to zoom started working on my old version of Chrome I mentioned earlier in the thread.  I can now zoom with the scroll wheel and plus/minus keys, but there's nothing else on the page, and I can't use the menu in the upper left corner.  If I spoof my useragent to Firefox, everything works fine except scrolling to zoom (even holding [ALT] or [CTRL]), and there are some minor alignment issues with the icons in the directions pane (which is normal on my version of Chrome).  Scrolling to zoom is broken in Street View as well.  Even in the old ClassyGMap I use, scrolling in Street View is broken if I use a Firefox useragent.  The useragent spoofer I use has Firefox 3.5 as the earliest version to spoof without adding a custom useragent, and that version works fine on Google Maps even though it'll be 10 years old at the end of the month.

Oddly, I was able to use 11 custom points on a route instead of the 10 that has been the limit.

These improvements give me a bit of hope for Google Maps not sucking anymore!

[sbeaver44]

US 15 in Pennsylvania has suddenly become US 15/501 everywhere.  I've been noticing it for a few weeks.  I was in Gettysburg and "Home via US 15/501 N" appeared.  I live near Harrisburg...

Nexus 6P

[Roadsguy]

There may no longer be a proper "Lite mode", but I've been having some driver issues leading to occasional WebGL crashes, which breaks Google Maps until I restart Chrome. When that happens, it's stuck in "2D mode", and I can no longer enable 3D view. This is also what appears for devices that just straight-up can't run the full map.

[chays]

One thing that is bugging me is that Maps is prominently showing certain POIs on the display when I don't want to necessarily see them.  In the past, I have used Google Maps extensively to look for hotels when I am planning a trip.  Now, it seems that hotel points cover the screen too extensively, even though I'm not currently looking for them.  It is an annoyance in that it places hotels at the expense of other types of features I might like to see.

[Kulerage]

US 15 in Pennsylvania has suddenly become US 15/501 everywhere.  I've been noticing it for a few weeks.  I was in Gettysburg and "Home via US 15/501 N" appeared.  I live near Harrisburg...

Nexus 6P

I can't believe this is STILL the case. Usually Google is better at fixing prominent issues.

[hotdogPi]

US 15 in Pennsylvania has suddenly become US 15/501 everywhere.  I've been noticing it for a few weeks.  I was in Gettysburg and "Home via US 15/501 N" appeared.  I live near Harrisburg...

Nexus 6P

I can't believe this is STILL the case. Usually Google is better at fixing prominent issues.

From what I remember, I-6 in Maine (should have been ME 6) lasted for over a year.

[bm7]

I noticed a weird gap in the Street View on US 1/City Avenue near Bala Cynwyd between Old Lancaster Road and 47th Street. There's plenty of coverage of the cross streets and even some of the business driveways along the road, but they all just stop abruptly. Anyone know what possible reason there might be?

I have started to see this a fair bit the past few weeks, and I haven't noticed any sort of pattern with it. I've seen bridges, highways, and residential roads have this problem. My only theory is that Google has adjusted the location of the roads slightly, and it no longer thinks the street view that was there previously is located on that road.

[Highway63]

I can't believe this is STILL the case. Usually Google is better at fixing prominent issues.

Iowa's zombie highways of the Second Great Decommissioning say hi. (Note, too, that IA 199 remains extended in the wrong place.)

[Skye]

I often like to use the maps feature that comes with Windows 10.  You have to go online to download the maps, complete with a search feature (for free) and once you do, you can access any downloaded maps while offline.  There are plenty of problems with these though.  I recently typed in "Rochester, NY" into the search bar and the map put me somewhere between the Catskills and Poughkeepsie.  There are plenty of other similar errors and issues with that.

[hotdogPi]

I recently typed in "Rochester, NY" into the search bar and the map put me somewhere between the Catskills and Poughkeepsie.  There are plenty of other similar errors and issues with that.

There are two Rochesters in New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochester,_Ulster_County,_New_York

[MNHighwayMan]

I can't believe this is STILL the case. Usually Google is better at fixing prominent issues.

Iowa's zombie highways of the Second Great Decommissioning say hi. (Note, too, that IA 199 remains extended in the wrong place.)

I actually don't mind this, because it makes locating most of the decommissioned routes really easy.

[NJRoadfan]

US 15 in Pennsylvania has suddenly become US 15/501 everywhere.  I've been noticing it for a few weeks.  I was in Gettysburg and "Home via US 15/501 N" appeared.  I live near Harrisburg...

One of NC's famous multiplexes is slowly taking over.....

The last time this happened also involved a NC highway label. US-64 was labeled as the Knightdale Bypass from end to end.

[D-Dey65]

There are some errors in the Village of Babylon along NY 27A that have to be changed. It shows the historic former Babylon Town Hall at 47 West Main Street (NY 27A) which is on the northwest corner of West Main Street and Cottage Row. However, they mark two other locations next door to it as being at 47 West Main Street, both of which are wrong. Furthermore, it claims that a local Chase Bank is located behind the former town hall, when in reality it's located on the northeast corner of West Main Street and Cottage Row, across from the old Town Hall.

The erroneous map here


But thanks to Microsoft's fucked up updates that they forced on me back in May, I can't sign in and correct those errors!

[vdeane]

That stupid left column that appears when you first load the page appears to have been fully rolled out.  I can't get rid of it by loading a new incognito session any more.  Why does Google have to keep adding such annoying things?

[MNHighwayMan]

That stupid left column that appears when you first load the page appears to have been fully rolled out.  I can't get rid of it by loading a new incognito session any more.  Why does Google have to keep adding such annoying things?

Because we're less and less supposed to use it like a traditional paper map.

Also, feature creep.

[vdeane]

That stupid left column that appears when you first load the page appears to have been fully rolled out.  I can't get rid of it by loading a new incognito session any more.  Why does Google have to keep adding such annoying things?

Because we're less and less supposed to use it like a traditional paper map.

Also, feature creep.

But why do they have to rub salt in the wound?  The sidebar does literally nothing that you can't do elsewhere.  And where are those of us who DO use it as a paper map that can give us travel times and street view supposed to go?  The sad thing is, even though Google Maps sucks more and more every single time they do an update, they're still several orders of magnitude better than the next-best online map simply because the others either implement features like street view and driving directions very badly (travel times on other providers are way off, and even though Google doesn't provide nearly enough points to alter routes, altering routes is even harder on every other map source) or not at all (only Bing has a street view equivalent, its imagery is updated rarely if ever, and it's a crapshoot as to whether an area will have coverage at all).

[MNHighwayMan]

With regard to Google vs Bing for street view, I actually found Bing's to be superior, at least for my home county. Google only covered the main roads and a few streets in town. But Bing, on the other hand, not only did the entire city, but also just about every back road in the entire county. (Isanti County, Minnesota, for the curious.) Google's coverage hardly even compares to that–the only thing they have the upper hand on, there, is image quality, which is slightly better (provided the images aren't from 2007/08, in which case Bing beats them on that, too!)

[vdeane]

Bing tends to be pretty pervasive where available, probably because they do it specifically by county, whereas Google does not.  Although their coverage in the area, now that I look at it, makes me think they also divide by town.  There are some pretty major holes in their coverage because of this.  Plus it's US only, I don't think they update often (most everything around here is from 2011), if ever.  Plus it can be slower than Google in terms of computer performance, and there's a bug where you can get stuck in a loop if you try to navigate within streetside.

[hbelkins]

What's needed is a good mobile app that shows county boundaries, for those of us who sometimes go traipsing off little local roads to visit a new county.

[Rothman]

People have been asking for county lines from Google for years and they just refuse to incorporate them beyond the simple boundary search that can be done now.

[MNHighwayMan]

Bing tends to be pretty pervasive where available, probably because they do it specifically by county, whereas Google does not.  Although their coverage in the area, now that I look at it, makes me think they also divide by town.  There are some pretty major holes in their coverage because of this.  Plus it's US only, I don't think they update often (most everything around here is from 2011), if ever.  Plus it can be slower than Google in terms of computer performance, and there's a bug where you can get stuck in a loop if you try to navigate within streetside.

Yeah, Bing's controls are a bit clunky, and I did come across that "stuck in a loop" bug, once, which was annoying. It kept happening in the same spot, though (even after closing my browser and clearing the cache) which leads me to believe it's an error within the navigation/map data itself and not some overall interface bug (or a combination of both, I suppose). The images for my hometown area are from 2015, though, so it appears that they're slowly but surely filling in the holes!

[thenetwork]

Anybody know the average time between GSV "recording" a street they drove down and the time it takes them to add it to the website?  I got in front of those elusive cars not too long ago on a street that was last recorded in 2012. 

[Kulerage]

The Red Outline for countries when you click them does not appear anymore. Normally this isn't a problem, but some of them have weird exclaves that are not easy to figure out. Especially when the country name doesn't always appear at the border