There's been one place that's been bugging me - it's in Apple Maps and in one of the "other" mapping sources, and it just dawned on me yesterday when I was going to a job site of mine where all of this crap mapping information/data could be coming from.
Mapquest. Part of AOL. Owned by Verizon.
I do travel, here and abroad. I only care about getting where I want to go, and there's several places in my mind that just "stick" with me. One place, an island, is very near where my mom lives and also where one of my clients is. The misspelling of the island has just stuck with me, silly me. This thread, and all its whining (and I resemble that remark...) is spot on with several comments and observations. I made a correction request less than two weeks ago about the name of the island, which was showing up in Apple Maps as a "park" - and Apple fixed it last week. Yet, the misspelled name remained - Puget Island, nowhere near Seattle but named for the same explorer/mapper...
If you're familiar with AutoCAD and apps like that, you're familiar with "base maps" - referenced-in underlays upon which drafting is done but without altering the source base map. Often, it's up to the supplier of the base map to make alterations or the rest of the overlay will reflect the errors in the referenced-in underlying base map. I've been using AutoCAD for almost 30 years, and have been platting property for about 25 of those years.
Yesterday I was searching for a property and saw it for myself in Mapquest - Pugget Island, not Puget Island. Just as it appears in Apple Maps. Not in Google/Sygic/Bing/Here we are (ugh)/OpenStreet Maps.
Traveling about, routing in Mapquest was identical to Apple Maps. IMHO they're using the same trip routing company (these mapping suppliers buy recommended routes from companies that do this for a living, if you didn't know that already?). I'm seeing traffic data identical to TomTom's offerings, but with some overlay issues (I know Apple isn't getting their traffic info from INRIX - I work with them periodically).
Two iPhone screenshots, taken within the hour:
View attachment 650700
View attachment 650701
I've worked on GIS data on that island, and no source I work with (including the County) includes that misspelling. Notice how the tagged "Little Island" and "Pugget Island" are in the same relative and general geographical area - Mapquest Maps on the left, Apple Maps on the right. Notice how, in the Mapquest map that most of the data is in UPPERCASE letters and some of the data is in lowercase letters - it's pretty much the same in both mapping apps.
I compared these two apps in several locations that I'm familiar with, and the same GIS errors exist in both apps (desktop and mobile). AFAIK, Mapquest has generally kept their directions/routing API in-house (
https://developer.mapquest.com/products/directions). To the users and non-US users of Apple Maps, I can only offer that I'd offer my mapping changes to both Mapquest and Apple, hoping that Apple cuts Verizon's Mapquest loose when their contract runs out...