Imaginary roads

[Wowbagger]

I have heard that map makers deliberately put "mistakes" into their mapping in order to catch out breaches of copyright: Googlemaps, for example, used to (possibly still does) mis-name "Middlemead" in W. Hanningfield, and I spotted two churches next to each other on one Ordnance map (no, not Willingale, somewhere else) where there was definitely only the one.

On plotting a route this morning in Bikehike, a road was marked here

http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=573102&Y=224430&A=Y&Z=120

leading south from a point just west of Childs on Hall Road. Neither Ordnance Survey nor OSM has any reference to such a road. It would be very useful if a road was there, but I'm not banking on it!

This is the first time I've found a road marked on a map which I am pretty certain isn't there. Has anyone else seen this phenomenon?

[Ian H]

If you move to 1:25000 scale you can see it – http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=573102&Y=224430&A=Y&Z=115

Here's the northern start of it on Streetview – https://goo.gl/maps/WhBL6

There are lots like that on the Somerset Levels. Google shows drove roads, paved or unpaved, muddy tracks, without distinction.

[woollypigs]

One "error/copyright" road on google map has been updated. I filled in the form to report the error back in 2010. Though, since then they have changed the provider of their maps and the way they handle errors/copyright. OSM, Bing(or what ever it was called back then), streetmap and multimap all showed the area differently to google, with only OSM being correct to how it is in real life.

I noticed quite a few in the up to date at the time London AtoZ I had. Rather annoying when it said there was a way to get from A to Z but you couldn't.

One way to check that the road is there, is to use streetview. If the G-car can go there so can you I used that on a road in Wales, the Ordnance Survey map we had said there was no road, but there was a nice panoramic view of the route. The OS wasn't at the time that old either.

[Kim]

This one's not so much imaginary as an ex-road, presumably a farm track that's been dead-ended by the A515 bridge and mostly absorbed by the hedgerow, yet the maps show it joining up (so GPS devices like to try to route cyclists down it):

http://binged.it/1IFg5SC

OSM and by impication Google seem to be the only ones that don't show it:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/52.7190/-1.8438
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.7189827,-1.844538,16z

[Pingu]

Wow: if you go down the mystery road with a GPS you can update OSM from the track recorded 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Doesn't that thick green dashed line indicate a bridleway rather than a road? Anwyay, "rights of way are liable to change and may not be clearly defined on the ground".

[robgul]

There's a cracker near here on Google maps - a clearly marked road is actually a river for about 300 yards ... admittedly it was a ford about 60 years ago (I have 1950s OS and it's not marked as a road on that)

... and on the error issue - the A-Z has an error on every single page to catch out copiers etc - my brother had the misfortune to have his business in a street in London E7 (that's Forest Gate/Wanstead Park) that was incorrectly printed the A-Z.  A real PITA

Rob

[yoav]

Across the road from me is a road which is marked on any Satnav that uses Navtech mapping (e.g. Garmin) but if you tried it you'd end up in my neighbour's garden. Deliberate mistake or just old data, I don't know.