How accurate is Google Maps at labeling your city's neighborhoods?

[xzmattzx]

I've always wondered how good Google Maps (and other websites or maps) were at labeling city neighborhoods accurately, as far as what the general public uses and accepts. 10-15 years ago, it seemed like maps were pretty lousy and inaccurate. But Google Maps has gotten a lot better in the past 3-5 years, it seems.

For instance, in my city of Wilmington, most of these neighborhood names are correct and located on their actual location: The Highlands, Wawaset Park, Union Park Gardens, Hedgleville, Quaker Hill, and Trinity Vicinity are all accurate. Brandywine Village should be ever so slightly south, along the river. Baynard Village is a new one to me, but could be correct. The only one that is completely incorrect is Compton Village. That area is called the East Side. There's a Compton Towers housing project there, so I'm wondering if the highrise's names was projected onto the neighborhood or something.

While Wilmington is pretty accurate, it looks like some cities are inaccurate to some degree. For instance, Phoenix and Scottsdale look like a mess. I know some of those names are accurate and in relative the correct spot. Arcadia, Coronado, and Willo all exist in Phoenix, and Old Town Scottsdale is correct. But some have to be incorrect, or housing developments projected as an entire neighborhood. Desert Cove, Golden Keys, Polynesian Paradise, and Scottsdale Mobile Estates sound like apartment complexes (or a mobile home park for the latter). So which are in the general lexicon?

[Steely Dan]

chicago has two levels of neighborhood naming.


first there are the 77 official macro-level city-designated "community areas" that have fixed boundaries and have been in use by the city since the the 1920s.

google maps is very accurate with those because they've had defined, well-known, unchanged boundaries for roughly a century now.


then there are the smaller, more informal neighborhoods that the community areas are split up into. those have much more nebulous, flexible borders depending on who you talk to (real estate people love to bend these).

google maps is obviously more hit and miss with these micro-level neighborhoods because they aren't always very well defined to begin with.



my community area is "lincoln square" which google maps depicts exactly as it is defined by the city: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Li...!4d-87.6886779

my micro-level neighborhood is "ravenswood gardens" and google maps has some funky boundaries for it that don't necessarily jive with how i've seen it defined by others: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ra...!4d-87.6938578

[Pedestrian]

No 2 San Franciscans agree on the exact limits of city neighborhoods so there's no point in arguing about it. Google's ideas are probably as good as anybody's. It only becomes a serious matter if somebody thinks you live in a less desirable 'hood (e.g the Tenderloin) and you think you're a few blocks outside it.

[sopas ej]

For my little city of South Pasadena, the only thing that I find a little odd is the "Olga" neighborhood. I might have read about it in old history books on South Pas, but nobody ever refers to that part of town as such. Raymond Hill is accurate; everyone calls that neighborhood Raymond Hill---even though there are no signs to indicate that that's what the neighborhood is called.

What I like about Google Maps is that for my city, it denotes 3 filming locations: The Pee Wee Herman House, the tree George McFly falls out of in "Back to the Future," and the original "Halloween" Mike Myers bush:

South Pasadena, CA
https://www.google.com/maps/place/So...4d-118.1503488

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

google maps is obviously more hit and miss with these micro-level neighborhoods because they aren't always very well defined to begin with.

my micro-level neighborhood is "ravenswood gardens" and google maps has some funky boundaries for it that don't necessarily jive with how i've seen it defined by others: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ra...!4d-87.6938578

I believe Google Maps (and other mapping services) get these from USGS' GNIS system, which contains "places" as coordinates on a map rather than areas. These places include city neighborhoods, but they dispense with figuring out boundaries and just provide a single point on a map.

Also, the GNIS is rarely (if ever) purged of neighborhood names that go out of fashion. My favorite archaic one is "Bohemian California" in Chicago which is plotted in roughly the east half of Little Village, but historically was a pretty loose term that applied to the entire Czech swath of Chicago stretching from Pilsen all the way out of city limits to Cicero and Berwyn. It also included North Lawndale, which eventually became a black neighborhood while all the rest became Latino.

Here is the entry for Ravenswood Gardens, which is also listed as a point:
https://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=1...wood%20Gardens

I think Ravenswood Gardens was probably the name given by the original developer, way back in the 1900s or 1910s... with Ravenswood Manor across the river. Bohemian California is just colloquial.

[The Chemist]

Ever since Google was blocked in China, Google Maps have become increasingly inaccurate when it comes to mapping of Chinese cities. I trust Chinese map apps far more these days than I do Google for any kind of accurate map data.

[xzmattzx]

Canadian cities like Toronto and Hamilton are very accurate on Google Maps, I've found, because neighborhoods are clearly defined by these cities. Main arteries also delineate each neighborhood.