Not so Mapquest. It is woefully unresponsive to its users. And it has countless errors and omissions, so that lack of responsiveness is particularly problematic for all concerned. My nearby pancake house and grocery store are comfortably nestled just to the east of the junction of State Highways 35 and 36 in Keyport, NJ, but Mapquest shows IHOP and Super Stop and Shop blocks away. A quick switch from the Street Map to Aerial Map view shows any local where the shops really are. Not only are the shops in the wrong place on the maps, but the listings themselves are troublesome. Stop and Shop is listed in Union Beach, a town down the road, and IHOP isn't cross referenced as International House of Pancakes, so it stubbornly refuses to appear in the Mapquest search results unless you remember the acronym.There's nothing I can do to make them update their listings. That's not to say that I can't offer corrections to Mapquest. That's another matter. But, like I said, it makes no difference in the end. I did that months ago with Mapquest regarding Sayrebrook Veterinary Hospital, which is located at the junction of Ernston Road and Main Street (Route 670) in Sayreville, NJ. Mapquest has the hospital -- yes, an emergency hospital -- marked on a vacant lot nearly a mile away near the Garden State Parkway. When I submitted a correction to Mapquest, they wrote back and said it might take a long while for them to do anything about it. They offered a short cut to the process, which involved faxing them a map with an X that marks the spot where the hospital belongs. I jumped through their hoops, but the hospital is still in the wrong place three months or so later.
As another example, as if you needed more, my cardiologist recently had the nerve to relocate to a street that Mapquest doesn' t know exists. That's reasonable enough in the short term, but there are now hundreds of addresses in what is a huge medical office park, complex after complex not mapped. Try the map and directions link at the listing for my cardiologist at Find a Physician. The link goes to the center of town, a default result that leads you nowhere.
I had to use Google to find another business (First Interstate Financial Corp) as my beacon to the new office park. It was considerable time and energy doing research. I landed on the general vicinity using Superpages maps. I still had to call the doctor's office to figure out where they were in relation to the other location, but at least I was in the ballpark.Superpages understandably had my doctor's former address, which was mapped correctly, and it even had a second listing showing his new address, but, alas, it misrepresented the office site as being south of Monmouth Mall on Industrial Way, far from its correct location miles north. I noticed that Superpages offers a button for corrections right on the map, but who knows if they are any more responsive than Mapquest. I doubt it.
In the end, I suspect that it is relatively easy to create these online maps using bulk data and sell lots of advertising online, but it will be a bear to keep up with all the myriad changes that will ensue over the years. Will they just dump in new data periodically and the hell with the interim changes? Can places like Mapquest keep up? I suspect not. They'd have to let volunteers help and maybe they aren't creative enough to figure out how to manage it? Maybe the new generation of GPS customers -- using Tom-Toms and other devices -- will feed the beast? In the meantime, we're driving in circles looking for breakfast, rushing our sick pets to nowhere fast, wasting our grocery shopping time, and having a heart attack in utter despair as we can't find our doctors.
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