Google street maps misaligned in China
When I first got to Shanghai, I felt confident that I wouldn’t get lost very easily thanks to good old Google Maps, a fantastic web application and perhaps the most useful of all the iPhone apps. Indeed, it has been helpful, but there are a couple of issues. Firstly, I soon realized that when in China the iPhone was geting map data from ditu.google.cn which had only Chinese labels; on the other hand, maps.google.com.au was only showing pinyin (roman letters), and I wanted both. Happily, this seemed to change after I was there a while, and last time I checked the iPhone had both pinyin and 中文 labels on the streets.
The other problem is larger and more annoying: The street maps aren’t aligned with the satellite view or the GPS coordinates. This means that when using the GPS feature on the phone, the blue dot is actually about 500m away from your real location. This leads, as you can imagine, to a lot of guessing and mistakes.
I assumed that this was a temporary glitch and somebody would notice and fix it, but not so. Searching Google yielded no information. I got to wondering about it again today, though, thinking there must be more to it. After some searching, all I was able to find was a tiny snippet in a forum post 58 pages into a thread: ” Most maps available for China are misaligned by ~300-600m.” The poster claimed this was a government regulation.
I couldn’t find any confirmation of this, and besides, I’ve seen Chinese cars with GPS in action. Can anyone else explain why the Google maps data provided by Mapabc in China is off by such a large amount and nobody, apparently, can do anything about it?
Tweet turned into comic
M and MX, who have an interesting site about China, Chinese and Shanghainese I often check out, turned a tweet I made into a bilingual illustrated comic. That’s pretty wacky. As one friend pointed out, being big in Japan is now passe, it’s cooler to be big in China.
As another friend pointed out, my alter ego has more hair than me…