With the organizers of the Great North Run apologizing for printing t-shirts and medals with a map of Sunderland rather than Newcastle, the Guardian takes the opportunity to look at recent instances of map mistakes, from dangerous routings to a too-short marathon route to a phantom supermarket in Wales.
Category: Map Errors
Ordnance Survey Asked to Change Route of Historic Path Through Dartmoor
Nick Pannell wants the Ordnance Survey to change the route of the Abbot’s Way path through Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. Pannell says his own research shows that medieval monks took a more northerly route between Buckfast and Tavistock, and that the path shown on OS maps since 1886 is wrong. The OS doesn’t dispute Pannell’s research, but says that the current route existed 130 years before the initial survey, and there are no currently existing paths along Pannell’s preferred route. This seems to be a case of the prescriptive vs. the descriptive: Pannell shows where the path used to be or ought to have been, the OS shows the current reality on the ground. Nor can OS change the map unless, per the article, Historic England changes the official route: it’s not OS’s call to make.
Apple Maps Roundup
9to5Mac notes two features coming to Apple Maps as of iOS 26 this fall: natural language search and commute notifications.
Meanwhile, Apple Maps briefly failed to treat Ontario’s Highway 407 as a toll road earlier this month, in what was probably an updating error. (The 407 is a fairly expensive toll freeway, but it’s split between privately and provincially owned sections; the province is removing tolls on its section, but Apple apparently applied that change to the whole route.)
Online Maps Updates, Late March 2025 Edition
An updated disclosure on Apple’s website spotted by 9to5Mac says that imagery collected in support of the Look Around feature of Apple Maps (Apple’s Street View equivalent) will also be used to train Apple’s generative AI. Meanwhile, a recent Apple Maps glitch displayed baggage claims at ridiculously high zooms, and a Google Maps glitch deleted Timeline data for some users.
The Trouble with Inflight Maps
Air Canada has apologized after its inflight maps were found showing the Palestinian Territories but not Israel, blaming an outside supplier and disabling the feature until a fix is made. The times are such that this sort of thing can be inflammatory as hell. Thing is, it’s not remotely the first time it’s happened. Per CNN’s reporting, it happened with JetBlue’s maps last year and with British Airways back in 2013.
So what’s going on? None of the articles give any sort of explanation, though the Snopes page suggests that GeoFusion is the ultimate source of the inflight maps. My guess is that there are airlines that cannot or will not show Israel on a map: several Gulf state carriers come to mind, and GeoFusion lists several on its website (though to be fair I have no knowledge of whether this actually applies to them). Is it possible that GeoFusion has a bespoke no-Israel version for these carriers, and every so often other airlines get that version by mistake?
Frankly if GeoFusion doesn’t have different versions of its maps I’d be shocked, seeing as they list Air India and several Chinese carriers as their clients, and the map required by one country is illegal in the other. To say nothing of how a China-compliant map with the Nine-dash Line would land with Vietnam Airlines, or Crimea-as-Ukraine with Aeroflot.
Inflight maps aren’t an immediately obvious front line in the various map wars (disputed borders, place names, etc.) but now that I think about it . . .
Google Maps Has a Lot of User-Contributed Imagery in the Wrong Places
Geography Now was poking around northern Chad in Google Maps and came across a bunch of user-contributed 360-degree images of business interiors that had nothing to do with Chad: they were associated with businesses in Brazil, India, Hungary and so forth. I’m inclined to think these were geocoding glitches or user errors, since the Gulf of Guinea (home of Null Island) seems to have a particularly bountiful crop of them, but I’m spotting shop and schoolroom interiors in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean too.
Three Dead After Google Maps Routes Travellers Across Incomplete Bridge—That Wasn’t Closed
The headline accompanying this Economic Times (India) article is more than a bit misleading: ”Google Maps leads three men to death as car plunges from incomplete bridge into river.” Horrifying. The bridge across the Ramganga River in Uttar Pradesh was closed after a part of it had been washed away in a flood several months previously. But there’s a twist. Google Maps didn’t mark the bridge as closed, and did route the travellers across it, but the road hadn’t been blocked or marked closed on the ground either. This wasn’t a case of ignoring local signage and blindly following online maps: local signage failed too. Google isn’t a panopticon: someone would have had to tell Google Maps that the bridge was closed, and I have to wonder whether that happened. But a Google Maps error makes for a better headline, one that goes international, than a horrible local lapse. At any rate, an investigation is ongoing. [Jalopnik]
Null Island as Easter Egg
Null Island is an inside joke among cartographers: an imagined island situated at 0° latitude, 0° longitude, where maps suffering from data glitches point themselves. If your map is centred on Null Island, something has gone wrong. So of course mapmakers have been having some fun with it—after all, it’s not something you could stumble across by accident. In a blog post, Alan McConchie of Stamen Maps delves into the lore and history of Null Island and its status as an Easter egg on the Stamen Maps platform, where it takes the shape of the island from the Myst game.
(As an update to my 2016 post on Null Island: Alan reports that the buoy at 0°, 0° has ceased to be. Also, the Null Island website, complete with flag, has moved here.)
OpenStreetMap Is Dealing with Some Vandalism
It seems OpenStreetMap has had to deal with a wave of vandalism attacks lately. If you see some nonsense on OSM, this post on their community forum outlines what to do about it (it may have already been taken care of even if it’s still appearing, so check for that; also, don’t post screencaps, because propagating the nonsense is what the vandals want). The OSM ops team provided this update on Mastodon today: “OpenStreetMap is now stronger with improved monitoring, automatic blocking, and respectful limits on new accounts. The default osm.org map is now quicker at fixing large-scale vandalism. Offline actions are also progressing.”
Pokémon Go Users Are Adding Fake Beaches to OpenStreetMap
Some Pokémon Go players are apparently adding fake beaches to OpenStreetMap in order to improve their chances of catching a new pokémon. The pokémon in question was added to the game last month and only spawns in beach areas. Pokémon Go uses OpenStreetMap as its base map. It’s not hard to see how players can cheat by adding natural=beach nodes where no actual beaches exist, and indeed beaches started turning up in odd places in the game—and in the real-world map as well, because the game uses real-world map data, and that’s what gamers have been messing with. Receipts at the OSM community forum thread. [Atanas Entchev]
The Map Men on Phantom Islands
There’s no shortage of books about phantom islands—islands on the map that later turn out never to have existed—but now the Map Men have done a video about them, using as a narrative hook the case of Sandy Island, and how it managed to stay on maps into the Google Maps era.
Apple Maps Lists Australian Restaurant as ‘Permanently Closed’—It Isn’t
ABC News (Australia) reports on how Apple Maps erroneously listed a Queensland restaurant as permanently closed, costing it thousands of dollars in lost business. What’s noteworthy is the difficulty the restaurant owner had in correcting the error. Apple accepts error reports via its browser and apps, and the owner is an Android and Windows user, but it seems to be more than that: a 9to5Mac commenter found it easier to correct map errors via their personal Apple ID than as a small business owner, whereas Google Maps makes it easier for businesses. The ABC News report goes on to note that this is not an isolated incident. [9to5Mac/
Google Maps Sends Drivers into Nevada Desert After Interstate Closure
Last month, after a dust storm shut down Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Barstow, Google Maps sent drivers off-roading, rerouting them via barely passable desert trails. Some were stuck for hours. Google has since apologized.
Jalopnik describes this as yet another case of blindly following, but I think this is a more specific failure mode. Rerouting due to road closures or traffic jams opens up routes that the algorithm would normally deprecate, and catches more drivers unprepared. It’s one thing when that means a quiet residential street gets an expressway’s worth of traffic, quite another when the second best choice is a dirt track—or a 500-mile detour. When the best answer the algorithm can give you is a bad one, it will still give you that answer.
Previously: Man Dies After Driving Across Collapsed Bridge, Family Sues Google; Google Rerouted Traffic Up Poorly Maintained Mountain Roads During a Blizzard; Google Maps Called Out for Showing ‘Potentially Fatal’ Mountain Routes.
Man Dies After Driving Across Collapsed Bridge, Family Sues Google
The family of a man who died after driving off a collapsed bridge is suing Google; they allege that despite multiple reports from users, Google Maps continued to mark the bridge in North Carolina, which partially collapsed in 2013, as passable, directing him and other drivers across it. The family is also suing local companies for failing to maintain the bridge or put up barricades and hazard warnings.
What3Words Confusion Rate Under Scrutiny
The What3Words geocoding service assigns a three-word mapcode to every three-square-metre patch on the planet, the premise being that three words are easier to remember and share than longitude and latitude to the equivalent decimal places. But the main complaint about What3Words (apart from the proprietary nature of its algorithm and database) is that it’s possible to get even those three words confused, especially in contexts where plurals and homophones may not be heard clearly, or where similar combinations of words are close enough to each other that they can be mistaken for each other. There’s actually an entire website dedicated to chronicling errors in W3W.
W3W maintains that their algorithm keeps similar combinations “so far apart that an error is obvious. We also worked hard to remove homophones and near homophones like sale and sail.” They rate the the chance of two confusing combinations appearing close enough to be unclear at about 1 in 2.5 million. But in a new analysis of the algorithm, currently in preprint, computer scientist Rudy Arthur argues that despite W3W’s claims this chance of confusion is far higher, and warns against adopting W3W as critical infrastructure (it’s used by emergency services, particularly in the U.K.) without testing and comparing against available alternatives. [The Register]
Previously: What3Words Hasn’t Had the Greatest Couple of Months: A Roundup.