>> I have a suspicion that gmaps infers roads from photographs, and some of the roads are not roads at all. > There's something called the TIGER database. [1]

>> I have a suspicion that gmaps infers roads from photographs, and some of the roads are not roads at all. > There's something called the TIGER database. [1] Of course, that needs to be populated and updated somehow and Google probably applies various corrections. That's for the US though, it wouldn't cover Canada (though Canada probably has an equivalent). IIRC, Google actually has a fairly large team of cartographers keeping Google Maps up to date. In addition to satellite and aerial photographs, and other maps, Google also has the benefit of Street View cars to give it on-the-ground data plus GPS tracks of customers using Google Maps on their phones. On OpenStreetMap, there's a layer that shows all the GPS tracks that its users have uploaded, all superimposed on each other (though last I checked it hadn't been updated in some time). It's pretty easy to make out real roads from that data. This website has some pretty good essays about Google Maps and other mapping services: https://www.justinobeirne.com/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/.