Hi Brent,
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The cow pasture story goes back some years. The latest error was minutes before my post. It routed me from my home to my barber shop along a road that was closed two years ago. Other mapping tools have long been updated. State GIS files are updated.
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I leave on the outskirts of Annapolis MD. It's a town with pretensions of being a city that happens to be the capitol of Maryland and is within an hour of both Baltimore and Washington DC. Your memory is close. I live on a peninsula. That has come up in previous posts because we lose electrical power often for extended periods because the common mesh power distribution network from which most people even in rural areas benefit isn't available to us. Water in the way and not enough people affected to make underwater distribution cables economic.
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A couple of months ago a tree fell on a main road. Again, peninsulas make things awkward. Alternative roads are very time consuming. Google Maps showed the road closure within half an hour of local emergency management text messaging of the road closure. Apple Maps doesn't show a permanent road closure that is two years old.
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GIS is essentially a utility at this point. I cannot explain why the performance of Apple Maps is so far behind the competition. That doesn't mean it's going to send you off a cliff like Thelma and Louise, but stories like that of Bob G. are all too common. Google Maps gets me within forty or fifty feet of residential addresses in my suburban neighborhood. I saw a Google mapping car about a year ago and Street View has been updated since then, so I missed a car driving through. I'm not in the boonies. *grin*
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I like Waze also, but since Google bought them and all the real time updates are shared I've gone back to Google Maps as I like the simpler interface better.
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For the peripheral discussion, getting older is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes even going outside to shake my fist at clouds causes something to hurt.
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dave
Dave Skolnick KO4MI