(I.e., Google feels its place data is accurate enough to build new features off of it.) ↩︎Ħ This whole “byproduct” thing reminds me of Kingsford Charcoal’s origin story. ↩︎ĥ AOIs also say a lot about Google’s confidence in the accuracy of its place data and its ability to keep AOIs up-to-date. In rural areas, addresses often correspond to mailboxes that aren’t anywhere near their respective houses: 14Ĥ “Google has said surprisingly little about how it’s making AOIs.” Google’s secretiveness in how it’s making AOIs has been somewhat to its detriment, as bloggers and journalists have drawn their own (sometimes unflattering) conclusions.

But you can’t call a self-driving car and say “oh, I live in the white building and the door is around the corner”.Īddress issues like these aren’t unique to cities. So the drivers either pull up to the correct building address and don’t see a door, or they pull up to a door that has a wildly different address on it.įor the moment, it’s a pretty minor issue-the easiest solution is just for the drivers to call the rider, and it works itself out. See, the address of my building is on a main street, but the actual entrances are on the sides of the building-and when I drop a pin at those locations, Uber maps them to nonexistent addresses. And I’m not alone-here’s Nilay Patel, writing in The Verge: I call an Uber to my apartment building, and the driver gets lost because they can’t find the door.

That’s because half the time I request a ride, I have to text/call the driver to coordinate my pickup spot.

That sounds great-but living in San Francisco, it’s hard to imagine this working smoothly.

Drive car google maps