[kirushik]

I'm curious if that's US vs Europe thing?

For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).

Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.

In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).

[dagw]

As a counter argument, here in Sweden I've yet to run into a place where Google maps has failed me when it comes to driving, public transport or address/POI search. OSM on the other hand is missing half the buildings once you get more then 15 km out from major city centers and even in major cities, things like house numbers and addresses is often wrong. The only scenario OSM is better than Google Maps is pedestrian and hiking routes.

[makeitdouble]

France and Spain had a pretty good coverage, Japan cities are decent as well. I've only seen Munchen and Kolhn's most touristic areas but there were decent enough we didn't hit any critical issue. Commerce data and opening hours was abysmal on the other hand.

OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.

[ilyt]

Here in Poland it's fine. Maybe that's due to the war Germans waged on google street view ? I'd think some of that was also used for mapping