PhilFAQS

It’s been a while since you heard that expression I’ll wager.  Now days I suppose there’s probably a law against taking kids to a candy store … if you can finds one … but the expression means I’m just bubbling over with enthusiasm.  Google maps has finally come to the Philippines.

As you may know when you went to Google maps until quite recently you could only see pictures … properly termed “overhead imagery”, some from aerial photographs (taken from airplane flyowvers0 and some from satellite cameras.

Now, the “Great Google in the Sky” has put up what we in the GIS world call an “overlay’ of the basic road network.  It’s not to a high level of detail in most places and it has inaccuracies … the Philippine road maps that you can buy in the store often have roads plotted out in the ocean if you try to plot actual GPS latitude/longitude coordinates on them … but they are a tremendous leap forward from the nothing we had up until now.

One thing that’s of interest to me is that many of the roads show route numbers.  All the major national Highways and many provincial highways had route numbers “back in the day” … meaning when the Philippines was sill a US commonwealth.  One of the brilliant things Doug MacArthur did when he organized Japan after the war was to number the highway system there … just as he did in the Philippines.  In japan you can still navigate via route numbers, for some reason the Philippines has seen fit to do away with them.  Perhaps Google can reverse that trend.

Anyway, go take a look at one of the maps I’ve already published, such as:

http://philfaqs.com/them-thats-living-there/getting-around-the-philippines-by-air/

Click the button on the top right for “Map” or “Hybrid” and take a look.  Remember, if you want to make your own map, you can do that too, I laid out all the steps here:

http://philfaqs.com/them-thats-living-there/how-to-make-a-google-map/

Happy Mapping!

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