
Nobody Wants to Let Google Win the War for Maps All Over Again - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-21/nobody-wants-to-let-google-win-the-war-for-maps-all-over-again
======
crusso
_On any given day, there could be a half dozen autonomous cars mapping the
same street corner in Silicon Valley._

It seems kind of tautological that they're using autonomous vehicles to create
maps because they need maps for autonomous vehicles.

Yeah, I know, specialty equipment... but still.

Actually, what seems really odd is that new maps are that big of a deal. The
cars need maps for normal navigation, sure, but you wouldn't expect that they
would rely on anything too precise for safety reasons alone. The cars need to
be able to adapt to possibly changing conditions and can't misbehave (at all)
just because a street closed, cones are on the street, etc.

 _Unlike conventional digital maps, self-driving maps require almost-constant
updates. The slightest variation on the road—a construction zone that pops up
overnight, or a bit of debris—could stop a driverless car in its tracks. “It’s
the freak thing that happens that’s going to make autonomous not work,” said
McNally, the analyst._

I would call an autonomous vehicle that couldn't handle some debris
"fundamentally broken".

Seriously, this mapping thing smells like a boondoggle.

~~~
jcadam
As someone who's old enough to remember road trips armed with nothing more
than a Rand McNally road atlas for navigation (really not that long ago - and
I do continue to take one along nowadays as a backup), I'll never trust an
autonomous vehicle that needs to be fed a constant stream of up-to-the-minute
mapping data in order to make decisions.

~~~
rimliu
I am with you here. Autonomous vehicle may need GPS for navigation, but it
should be able to drive down the roads without it.

~~~
jcadam
GPS is a nice-to-have, but wouldn't be necessary for a _true_ AI, given an
autonomous car can have more and better on-board sensors than your basic-issue
human (we don't have eyes in the backs of our heads, or LIDAR).

~~~
nemothekid
I don't see how GPS is a "nice to have". How does an entity know to get from A
to B without some sort of navigation assistance?

Unless your "true-AI" stops to ask locals for directions, its going to need
some sort of GPS. Can't say I'm looking forward to arguing with my car about
how it should have taken a left on Main St, instead of a right.

~~~
white-flame
> _I don 't see how GPS is a "nice to have". How does an entity know to get
> from A to B without some sort of navigation assistance?_

GPS ≠ navigation assistance. You can infer where you are on a conceptual map
from reading your surroundings, especially signage. Getting a
latitude/longitude estimate from the GPS network and trying to match it with
an overly precise and possibly out of date map isn't the only way to infer
your current position. It's only useful when you don't already know where you
are, and computers are good at precisely remembering the path they took from
the last known observed reference.

Plus, self-driving cars need to be aware of their surroundings, and not solely
rely on blindly following a hyper-precise map as a prescription of the road
details ahead. Having the local observations become the canonical precision
knowledge, and keeping the map as conceptual knowledge of how roads connect
places, implicitly gains a lot of this sort of benefit.

------
jpalomaki
Governments should open all their mapping data, as some have already done.
Probably in quite many countries, there are also entities collecting more
detailed data that is used for the maintenance of the roads. All this should
be opened up as well. I believe just giving out the data freely will benefit
these countries more than trying to extract some small profits by selling it.

~~~
larrymyers
The US does have open mapping data:

[https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-
data/data/tiger.html](https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html)

While useful for taking the US Census, the TIGER data isn't really suitable
for most navigation tasks. At best it can be used as a base layer to build a
geospatial dataset.

OpenStreetMap did this about a decade ago:

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER)

That being said, the current administration is looking to cut TIGER funding,
not increase it.

For the foreseeable future getting mapping data suitable for navigation in the
US is going to be the job of private for-profit companies.

~~~
ghaff
I've read that a lot of the limitations/errors associated with mapping data
once you get away from fully maintained paved roads stems from limitations in
TIGER data. You get into very secondary roads and there's not much that's
really authoritative to distinguish all the gradations between unpaved but
well-graded and maintained and in appropriate weather you can drive it with
high-clearance 4WD if you know what you're doing.

~~~
maxerickson
For a navigation system those roads are mostly a "last mile" problem. They
generally aren't as direct or connected as main highways, so graph based
navigation naturally ignores them. Main highways are also reasonably well
marked in the tiger data, so the lack of differentiation for the lower
priority road type doesn't impact a system that prioritizes larger highways (a
pretty reasonable heuristic).

The lack of differentiation is a big problem if you want to pick which way to
go when driving around though.

~~~
ghaff
I mostly agree with all that. Although in some areas like the rural US West,
very secondary roads are pretty common. This becomes a bigger problem as more
and more people depend on computers to tell them where to go without thinking
much about it.

Of course, this isn't really a new problem. People have died following roads
on paper maps that weren't suitable for, say, winter travel.

------
twic
I found it mildly amusing to see an article about concerns over data monopoly
on a Bloomberg website.

~~~
dalbasal
A good example of new vs old generations of data monopolies.

But, I think we need to stop thinking of the tech monopoly problem in
principled, abstract terms. That's hard because it's how law works, and how
our moral instincts genrally work.

Bloomberg's data monopoly does/did pay well, give them a nice moat and such.
But, it couldn't be leveraged in the same way modern data monopolies can. It
didn't permeate into new areas every day. It didn't have all these
consequences (eg killing privacy) of scale. They din't lock up a dominant
position in categories (eg smartphones, cars) that wouldn't exist for a decade
or three.

Bloomberg's market position is more conventional. Being a monopoly gives them
pricing power, and nicer margins. That is tame by today's standards.

Today's monopolies can't even be reasoned about in the language of antitrust.
they don't act as trusts, generally. Market share is obscure. How do you
determine the effects of reduced price competition for maps? It's free. The
whole logic of econometrically calculating the harm to a consumer is
irelevant.

Yet, the idea that Google owns your phone, browser, search engine, drives your
car and controls the ads you see 100 times a day.... That's still a worrying
thoguht. Economically, it's easy to see (eg search->maps->phones->cars) how
one monopoly leads to another and they strengthen eachother.

------
dalbasal
It's worth stepping back and considering the landscape of self driving.

First, the fact that it's within reach is amazing. It's one of those wierd
cases where regular people instinctively put it in the "mars colony" category
of futurism while sober insiders had to bring us back to a more optimistic
view.

Now, there is a lot to worry about in the current landscape of giant tech
companies, and this article is another example. But, there are things to awe
at too.

Having self driving within reach... it's a result of massive effort. Amazing
technology, and complexes of technology it is built on. This includes the
manufacturing technology producing the cheap components.

All of this cam from (1) fairly blue sky intiatives (2) with extremely long
and uncertain payback periods and (3) tremendous strategic money-where-your-
mouths are foresight. When I realized what G where doing with street-view, I
thought it was crazy. More a sign of overexuberance and too much money. Turns
out, it was en route to maps dominance which was en route to transportation
dominance (and phone dominance).

IDK if this is unprecedented, but it's fairly unrivaled in today's world. We
don't see IBM or Intel, Toyota or McKesson thinking this big or this far.
Definitely not banks or money businesses. Not cities or countries, generally.

I mean an equivalent in health/medicine would be taking the ideas from TED
talks. A personalized health revolution. Nanobots or curing death like Aubrey
de Grey keeps talking about.

I'm already hearing the "regulations" explanation. Medicine is restrained by
surgeon generals, parliaments and national health setups. I don't think that
argument holds at this scale. Self driving cars require re-rwriting our
transport rules, and probably massive the physical infrastruucture. The
technology will have sucked up billions decades before it makes a penny. The
guiding idea is that "if we have a true self driving car, the other stuff will
sort." Same applies to medicine. If it's better enough, it'll take.

It's hard to peer back and determine of something was inevitable or not, but I
suspect self driving wasn't. It could have happened (could will happen? tenses
are hard) decades later, if not for the fairly outrageous decisions of a small
number of people.

~~~
lambdadmitry
I can't help but think that self-driving cars is the penultimate American
thing. They aren't effective or needed in properly built cities (think London)
and they won't make THAT much good to the society eliminating taxi drivers. If
we dig into the vision of what people want to achieve with them, it's mostly
manifestations of American problems (poverty, systemic racism, homelessness,
segregation, insular indifference to others' problems, crazy urban sprawl)
which people don't want to confront directly, instead opting for "let's spend
HUMONGOUS amount of money to keep everything more or less the same".

There is a solution for most problems people try to solve with self-driving
cars: more cycling, better public transport, denser cities. Look at London:
car use is _heavily_ discouraged (20mph speed limit, congestion charge,
expensive parking) and still the whole thing works like a charm.

~~~
d3ckard
You're missing many advantages of self-driving.

1\. Better safety - I find it very likely that self-driving cars will reduce
the amount of traffic incidents. Algorithm will likely act more stable than
human driver.

2\. Better fuel consumption - again, more optimised driving patterns.

3\. Better convenience - you can drink and drive(well, car will drive), you
can sleep and drive, you can work and drive.

4\. Better transport - self-driving trucks don't need breaks, are not likely
to be overworked and will likely not block motoways taking over another truck
going 2 km/h slower (yey European highways!).

5\. Better vehicle utilization - we will be able to reduce total number of
vehicles and all the congestion, environment pollution and money that comes
with it.

While solution you mentioned really improve quality of life in cities, they do
not ultimately solve issues inherent to car transport, where car transport is
actually preferred/best solution.

~~~
grumdan
Good public transport systems provide even better benefits for points 1
(accidents involving subways are probably still going to be rarer than for
self-driving cars), 2 (you don't even need fossil fuels for subways / trams),
and 5. Arguably you don't lose much on point 3 either, except that you may
have to walk a few minutes to/from the nearest stop (which is probably good
from a public health standpoint anyway).

I agree that this only applies in cities though, and public transport may not
help much in rural areas.

------
thriftwy
We can have a hundred millions of self-driving cars dumping the sub-centimeter
LIDAR data of surrounding to OpenStreetMap at any given time.

Come to think of it, I see zero reasons why you won't own measurements of your
self-driving car, and choose to upload them. Yes corporations may try to pass
it as _their_ intellectual property, we should fend them so hard they roll
back into XIX century.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Cars are going to lock down their LIDAR systems, so the best one can hope for
is that the companies that control that data are also friends of OpenStreetMap
and will pass the data on. I’m not optimistic that the individual owners of
cars will be able to read from the LIDAR bus without – at best – voiding their
car’s warranty.

~~~
thriftwy
> I’m not optimistic that the individual owners of cars will be able to read
> from the LIDAR bus without – at best – voiding their car’s warranty

That's one consumer protection law away.

And no, I don't believe in "being friends with OSM". I believe in owning your
data.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _That 's one consumer protection law away_

“If you buy the car you own the data stream, and must be able to keep it
private; read, modify and re-distribute it; and sell it” is a good idea.

> _I believe in owning your data_

Gentle political note. This sounds more radical than it is or than your
argument needs it to be. The first suggestion stands well enough on its own.

------
jekdoce
The thought provoking contrast presented in the article is camera derived
sparse maps with lane lines, road edges, signs etc. vs lidar derived dense
detailed models of the whole environment. Any thoughts around why the former
is not enough? If it is enough it would certainly be preferable, since smaller
in size and likely easier to maintain.

~~~
tonygrue
My guess is that the more detailed, dense map allows the car to precisely
localize itself by using its view of the world to match against the map,
yielding a location more precise than GPS (and for when gps doesn’t work); eg
ICP point cloud matching/alignment/registration. More sparse maps would give
you a less confident match, and you’d have to convert what the car is seeing
to the sparse form.

------
jacksmith21006
Bumped into this comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps and it is excellent.

[https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-
moat/](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/)

~~~
GoToRO
Motivated by a road that was on one map but not the other, I built this:
[http://comparemaps.drona.ro/](http://comparemaps.drona.ro/)

------
leoc
I've been wondering when Google (or someone else) is going to do the same
thing for pedestrian routes and locations. There are plenty of highly-
trafficked places where GPS is unavailable or not precise enough, and mapping
WiFi stations evidently isn't enough to fill the gap. Of course the problem
could, and should, be attacked by ground-based radio systems * , but 100%
coverage by such systems certainly won't arrive anytime soon, and it wouldn't
be like the tech companies to wait for it. You _would_ have to take your phone
out to get a location fix ... but that likely won't be the case whenever AR
glasses really start to appear in public, and the techcos will also be happy
to stick cameras on your clothes and luggage if they and you can get away with
it.

* Come on Transport for London, it's high time to show some leadership here.

~~~
adventured
Do you primarily mean high density walking areas, or essentially everywhere
that you can freely walk as a pedestrian?

~~~
matwood
In Europe in particular (and I'm sure elsewhere) a lot of pedestrian areas are
very narrow. The lack of precision is a big problem. I have not had same
number of issues in the US presumably because so many pedestrian areas were
built with cars in mind (at least at first).

------
jbverschoor
No pois, no maps.

Google is unfortunately still the winner here.

------
erikb
well all my POIs are in gmaps and I have the app installed everywhere. No idea
why I wouldn't want them to stay at the top. Push them please, so they improve
their software, but winning they should.

------
losteverything
Nobody wants to let Google win again.

I do. Google greatly enhanced my life, esp. Driving and directions.

I was an adult BI and speak from experience

------
craigyk
Just last week Google maps directed we take a turn going down the wrong way of
a one way street that was already clearly marked as one-way on the map- yeah,
I'm not too worried about even Google's dominance in this area.

Also, Apple maps in my area has been quietly, but steadily improving. Still
not as many POIs as Google, but nicer interface and turn-by-turn (IMO).

~~~
Chriky
Where did the one way street thing happen exactly? I find it very interesting
that it can do that, it implies a disconnect between the rendered data and the
data used for routing.

~~~
irrlichthn
It could also be a simple routing bug. You cannot know.

~~~
darren_
It's also very frequently people being in 'walking' mode without realizing it

~~~
jstarfish
I'm surprised the accelerometer doesn't question its input when I appear to be
doing 75mph on foot.

------
Harrisonbans
Well, when this happened than really everyone no need to worried about to lose
their home in the world.

------
joshfraser
It's not about mapping. It's about collecting data and training their machine
learning algorithms.

