A Warning and a Business Opportunity
February 18, 2008
Street Number Issues on GPS Maps
The Boston Globe published an article yesterday that highlighted an issue that may be the next one to solve for GPS makers and their map suppliers; Street Number inaccuracies. Typically, the map maker will take a look at a street, see that house numbers go from 1 - 200 and then evenly distribute those numbers along the length. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If you use a GPS, you’ve probably already noticed when searching for a specific business address or house number, and the GPS tells you that you’ve arrived, and you actually have another 200 yards (or more) to go to actually get there, you know what I am talking about. … read the rest of the GPS Lodge article here
It’s really amazing how many times this issue has not come up in the years I have been specifying, implementing and selling GPS tracking services. It’s big, and it’s being virtually ignored by the big players in mapping.
Note, please, just so you are smarter than the average newspaper reporter, that this is not an issue with GPS at all. GPS receivers … the small handheld’s you use for hiking trips, the dashboard navigation units that this article is focused on, or the commercial-grade vehicle tracking systems I mostly write about all have nothing whatsoever to do with street address. The combination of the GPS Space Segment (the satellites in orbit around the globe) and the User Segment … the receiver you are using, does one thing and does it well. Working together the satellites and the receiver calculate your position on the surface of the globe in standardized GPS latitude and longitude coordinates.
From that point on, non-GPS providers and systems take over. Most likely your receiver has a digital map inside, provided by one of a number of big names in the mapping business. It may also have a software routing and driving directions program … the tool that generates the little ‘turn right now’ voice that helps you find your way.
I make the distinction for an important reason … improvements, modification, adjuncts to the GPS system have noting to do with the problem … and the problem is hardly being touched.
In North America we are used to a semi-rational system of street numbers. usually numbers start at a certain end of each street and proceed down the street in rational order, even on one side, odd on the other. But there is no standard at all. One political entity may decide to run their numbers increasing from north to south, while the next town may run their numbers in the opposite order. Some towns dictate that numbers jump by five or ten per building, leaving room to add more addresses in the future. Other decree that every street intersection start a new group of numbers, so #78 may be the house on one corner of a cross street and the house on the opposite side of the cross street may be #200.
It’s a mess and I don’t see any sort of unifying effort to make it better. I have personally lost business and sales over the problem and I’m sure others have as well. It’s an issue, it’s a real-world issue that costs business billions per year, it’s not getting any better and it is not a GPS issue.