Had a precise example of a mapping error in Sydney, Australia for my AirBnB located at 3/239 Victoria St in Darlinghurst, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Great location in the middle of a fun central neighborhood. The front door is on the east side of the building, on Victoria St itself. But that map pin there is in the middle of the building, the centroid of the rectangle. And that means a lot of map software guesses the address is just a bit closer to the west side of the building, to that little Hayden Ln. Which is a back alley you can’t really drive in and isn’t accessible from the apartment.
This caused real problems with Uber. Their routing software would sometimes try to send the driver up to the back alley.Drivers are smart enough not to do that, but following the purple line put them on Liverpool St where they can’t turn left on to Victoria St to drive to the actual door. This detail mattered because one of us was injured and couldn’t walk the half block down to Liverpool St. Also the routing was unstable; sometimes it directed drivers to the east side on Victoria St and then would flip mid-drive to the west side on Hayden Ln. Which changes the whole route by half a kilometer because Victoria St is one way.
We have the official address point data from the Australian government on OpenAddresses. They geocode the address as 151.2212399,-33.8779683 which is just a hair further southwest than the Google Maps pin. That’s the official correct location for the address but it does not describe the ground truth. Bing Maps has more or less the same wrong point as Google, so does Apple. OpenStreetMap doesn’t have the street number at all and guesses the wrong segment of the road.
The underlying problem here is the database has the polygon for the building but not the exact point of the front door. So it guesses a point by filling in the centroid of the polygon. Which is kinda close but not close enough. A better heuristic may be “center of the polyline that faces the matching street”. That’s also going to be wrong sometimes, but less often.
One extra wrinkle: our proper address was “3/239 Victoria St Darlinghurst”. It’s not enough to say Sydney, you have to name the actual suburb Darlinghurst, because there are multiple Victoria Streets. And the 3/ is an essential part of the address, naming the apartment unit number. Various official forms won’t just accept “239 Victoria St”.
PS: Gelato Messina is excellent.
Update: a friend at Mapbox tells me they do something similar to my heuristic. It’s implemented in this library and is in process to be added to their geocoder. He describes the algorithm as “drawing a bisecting line from the address point to the closest point on the street line”. I imagine the details are more complicated.
Update 2: a second example, 2324 Sacramento St SF, CA. The map pin is in the middle of the building which caused our Deaf Uber driver to go to the “closest” point, that stupid alley on Clay St. There’s a lovely driveway and drop-off location right at the street frontage on Sacramento that we could not get the driver to go to, between communication difficulties and map failures.