OT How does GMaps know elevation?

Better be careful who you let into your house!

Wow. That's good. They go slowly so the pictures won't be blurred.

How does GMaps get updates to street maps.

Does it infer the streets from computer analysing the sat view?

Or do municiplities send it updates when they construct new streets?

In some places, they show paths between houses with a dotted line? Who tells GMaps about the paths? If you choose Walking, it will route you over the path, but no other method of travel will go that way.

Part of the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath in England is on "strretview" , no street anywhere near

We all know google leans left so why would you be afraid to have a democrat from google inventory your house? Isn't socialism all about sharing?

The latter. In regions with new streets or buildings you can see streets on the streetview and bare land in the sat view.

Streets are shown in new developments even when they not yet have been laid, but have been submitted as planned.

They go pretty fast when the Faroe Islanders are trying to f*ck them.

That would be Utah!

Where the men are men, and the sheep are all nervous.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

Here they get it from the operation that is doing the new streets.

That wouldn't give them the street names.

Not send google so much as update their database and google accesses those. We have seen it take a while before the google map is updated with new ones. This is one example.

With ours they are on the council maps, what you call municipalitys.

Ours work fine for bicycles but google doesn't use them for bikes.

Can you post a proper link ? I can only get google maps to show photos of it.

Several. USGS probably releases topographical data. There is also data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). See:

Several projects attached to the Open Street Map project inculde tools to integrate SRTM data into maps installable on various GPS devices.

I guess it depends on the quality of your local database. Here we see new streets and quarters on Google Maps that do not yet exist in reality (but have been planned and will be built).

The local database is fine, it just takes google a long time to use the updates.

That not necessarily due to the quality of the local database.

We saw the google car show up again here almost 18 months ago, after it had been here previously more than 10 years previously. The second time they only zoomed thru some of the main streets in town and didn?t even bother to visit the new roads and houses.

I do a lot of work with local GIS departments and the quality is extremely variable. Some are on top of it and others are completely out of their depth. At least one uploads their edits to ESRI and not Google. Google puts their dispatch center in the wrong place so they don't exactly trust them.

There are several big players like HERE (formerly NavTeq) and TeleAtlas. Licensing their data isn't cheap and depends on how frequently you want it updated. TIGER/Line is the US Census Department and the data is free but the update cycle is slow. It's interesting to take the data for the same area from several different sources, overlay it, and see where it differs.

It likely is all coincidence. They fetch the info once every so many years, and it could include very recent information or it could take several years.

This is not at all related to it. The google car does not map the streets, it collects data and pictures.

Why would they do it so slowly ?

And the google maps don?t show the new ones in bursts like that.

Duh.

How so? Wikipedia says this:

"Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers can also determine altitude by trilateration with four or more satellites. In aircraft, altitude determined using autonomous GPS is not reliable enough to supersede the pressure altimeter without using some method of augmentation"