My point is that I do not think that google uses the street view car data for creating their road networks at all, because the data is effectively useless at th

My point is that I do not think that google uses the street view car data for creating their road networks at all, because the data is effectively useless at that for a wide variety of reasons. The first reason is that while GPS data has sufficient accuracy to, with markov models, correctly identify which road of an established road network you are on, it doesn't have sufficient accuracy to retrospectively create an accurate road network from raw GPS tracks. The second reason is that the route that the street view cars take would cover the road network for photographic purposes is not sufficient to enumerate the annotations that must be captured in a road network to facilitate navigation, especially once you consider that street view has not just driving navigation but also cycle and pedestrian navigation. The third reason is that the street view car will not drive most roads frequently enough to be sufficient for map maintenance and will not drive many roads at all ever, purely on a cost basis. Google maps gets their road data from a series of partnerships with private companies and public entities. Those partners provide highly detailed, human maintained road network data which are integrated into an annotated directed graph which is then used for navigation. Street view cars fundamentally do not have enough information or accuracy to be an authoritative source for this, and it's far more likely that the street view cars get their driving routes from google maps' road data. It's possible they consider some street view data in generating their map features. But again, there's a wide variety of reasons that street view might then not go down a road, so having google maps automatically remove a road from their dataset when the street view car doesn't go down it would result in far, far more numerous and problematic edge cases than this one (think roads disappearing because they had construction on the day google street view was in the area or the driver missing an area of town and having it disappear from the map). I have no insider knowledge and google is fairly quiet about their process but I would expect street view to be essentially a feature only built on top of the road network, and I would be extremely surprised if it functioned as the authoritative source for it. If we look for a process improvement, I think what could have been a feasible organizational solution is -- since the google street view car has been down this path since the accident -- to encourage street view car drivers to submit corrections for the road network when it's incorrect and prioritize those. But it sounds like humans were already submitting this and nobody was doing anything and others have commented on how opaque the process can be so I've no idea what happened on that end.