[Landkruzer]

I have been a regular visitor to team-bhp for so many years. Since I have been coming here so often, I felt I was already part of it. I am already a fan of so many bhpians like route guru ampere, mpksuhas (just made a trip to gandikota & belum caves after reading his travelogue) and so many others. I planned many of my trips based on the information available here. I am feeling so great to be finally part of this group, the mecca of the motor heads.

Exploring new roads, new places is a passion for me. Since I insists so much on road trip for vacations, once my wife quipped to my son “your father will goto moon also by car”. Like most bhpians goto Himalayas for their annual pilgrimage, I have also completed my ‘once in a lifetime’ pilgrimage to Ladakh in 2012. It was a 20 days epic journey from Bangalore with friends. We also have plans to goto Singapore by road in 2018.

I also have an unusual hobby – Digital Mapping. There are crowd sourced mapping projects like open street map and google map maker.(Yes, india part of google maps is entirely crowd sourced) I chose google maps, as it is being widely used and my contribution benefits a large amount of people. I mainly work on correcting the long distance directions, based on my personal knowledge and from information from the web. I can talk for hours together on this topic, but I will leave that for some other day.

On the personal front, I am 43 years young, live in Bangalore, drive a Hyundai i20 and work in the IT industry. My wife also equally enjoys driving and sometimes we fight for the wheel!

Once again, thanks team-bhp for accepting me as a member, hope I will be able to contribute in a small way.

[ampere]

Great to have you here. Your hobbies are pretty much like mine. I just love the GPS as a technology and cartography. But yes its also the thrill of driving an unknown road for the first time which pulls one in.

All the best once again.

[Landkruzer]

Thanks ampere. I very rarely come across people who understand digital cartography. I didnt know that you are interested in that as well. Good to know that. I have seen one another bhpian doing some edits in Google Map Maker, may be there are more.

[ampere]

I am not active into Map Maker. But I just like subject of cartography. Am pretty much a consumer of the content. The way I channel the crowd sourced part is by channelling folks to the right route. So that way when more folks take a given route, that becomes the default route for the given start and end points.

A case in point: BLR-Pondicherry : Now the default route is via Arcot/Cheyyar rather than Tiruvannamalai which is the shortest route. I have seen that change happen over the years. And I think we as a forum, have a lot to contribute towards that change.

[Landkruzer]

Few facts about Google India Maps. This will help everyone to understand why it works the way it is, and when to rely on it and when not.

Background:
Google started the Map maker project in India from June 2008 and let everyone to add the content(roads, shops, offices etc) to the map. It was a free for all run, anyone can edit anything after gaining some trust level. The roads were added with default attributes (ALL NH and SHs with 80kmpl) and people added local roads with 80 kmpl average speed and drawn local roads a SH. By 2012, google manged to get all the maps drawn, but with poor quality. Just after launching the navigation in 2012, google introduced new moderation controls to bring some sanity to the maps. Ad this helped to improve the quality of the maps, and now almost all edits need to be reviewed by google.
Watch this video if you would to know more about how the google maps is maintained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls

How direction works:
Google maps uses static and live information for calculating directions between two points. The static information is the average speed defined for the road segment. (A road segment can be as small as few mtrs and can be upto a km also). Live information is the google traffic data. Google traffic is available in many metros and highways. When you ask for direction between two points, it computes the path with least amount of time (remember the shortest path algorithm in graph theory?) using the average speed configured for the road and applies the traffic data if available and gives you the best route possible.

Few points to note:
1.There are many roads still exists with incorrect attributes, this will make the google maps to give wrong directions, so dont rely on it completly.
2.You help others when you use Google maps for navigation. When you use google maps navigation, it helps google to acquire traffic data and this enables google to provide better route suggestion.
3.Google does not update the maps. (there are some exceptions). If the shirdi ghat is closed, it needs to be updated by someone. If the Arakalagud-Ramanathapura-Kushalnagar-madiker is better than the road via somwarpet, the average speed need to increased for the same by someone. If the Dumka-Bhagalpur road is bad, it needs to be marked as bad by someone.


Disclaimer: I do not work for Google maps directly or indirectly.

[kamdrider]

@LandKruzer - Welcome! I'm also new here and yours was the first introduction I read .

Thanks for sharing the googlemaps bits - it's an interesting thing to know about.

Originally Posted by Landkruzer

The roads were added with default attributes (ALL NH and SHs with 80kmpl) and people added local roads with 80 kmpl average speed and drawn local roads a SH.

Guess there is a typo with kmpl - shouldn't this be kmph?

[Landkruzer]

Thanks Kamdrider and welcome to team-bhp.

Yes, that was a typo. noticed few other mistakes too. Also wanted to post this in the "GPS/Maps Discussion thread", but ended up posting here. Lesson learnt: Post when the brain is fully active.