We’re pretty lucky in some areas of digital life in Australia. Google has a lot of capacity to capture data about us and our world, including the speed limits on our roads. So the recent update on Maps Coverage on developers.google.com offers some fascinating insight into what data Google do have.
Australia is covered by “good data quality and availability” for Driving, walking and biking directions. Where our data is classified as approximate is in the speed limits on our public roads.
What I found interesting is that we’re not alone in that and some countries speed limits, traffic data as well as bike directions are outright not available. Some of these were previously listed as approximate, now listed as unavailable or very low data quality. For the full list, check out the Developers post where you may quickly see the trends on where these degraded data sets are from a political perspective.
That being said, there are also some upgraded locations including Austria, Finland, Portugal and Spain where speed limit data has changed from approximate to a “good” data rating. This is promising to see continued data collection and verification happening, it will only serve to make the services Google offer better in the long run.
Link seems to be broken to the developer post.
Not seen the speed limit yet in my google maps, see the speed I am doing though.
I’ve noticed speed limit in Google maps navigation for few months, but yet to see it in Android auto.