What coordinates to use for unmapped buildings?

My personal preference is to choose a point about 10' up a driveway or entrance road. I use Google Earth to position that location then put the long/lat into a custom POI. That technique seems to skirt the issue of a POI being too far "off the road."
I'm sure that other folks have other opinions.

I would agree that the driveway is a good spot. Since most of these Custom POIs are used in auto/car based GPS units, the majority of people will be driving to them.

So locating the point near the road at the point at which the user should leave the road is most useful.

I agree with the above posts rather than using the front door to the location. I believe you had posted regarding Redner's Warehouse Markets POI previously, which I happen to travel to on a regular basis. I'm sure I'll be using this POI in the future.

Take the Fredricksburg location as an example. The building itself is closer to I-78 instead of US-22. If you were to use the "Front Door" for the coordinates, the GPS may route you onto the Interstate to "arrive" at the destination heading east rather than US 22.

If one were to travel to this "destination" you would realize that you would have to take the next exit a few miles down the road, and then backtrack (not following GPS as it will still want you to be on the Interstate) to get to the destination.

I believe it is best to use coordinates that will allow you to drive as close to where you need to park than the actual building.

For building located near multi-line roads the best place to put mark is probably at 15-20 yards down entrance road from main street. This way you will not pass accidentally entrance (this can cost a lot of time and miles to drive sometimes). Additional profit is that gps will always know on which side of the road this place is.

Particular building will be usually easy enough to find. Problems are mostly - in my experience - to find entrance to parking lot than to find building itself. Especially when entrance is located on side or back of building.

A while back I did some simulations to determine that "alerts" "along the route" will sound if the coordinates are within 30 meters (just under 100 feet) from the road. So, you can see that coordinates someone might use for "alerts" should be within a 30 meter perpendicular distance from the road.

grzesja's comments are on target - you will usually see the building before you determine how to get to it. That is why the others are recommending that the POI coordinates should be 20 feet or so off the road on which the GPS would be traveling and in the middle of the most likely entrance road.

It is important to me to have the coordinates be on the correct side of the road, not in the middle. When you are in an unfamiliar area, you do not want to be in the wrong lane. That is why entrances work well.

It is also important to have the coordinates near the main road as some like to make alerts for the location. They will not work if you make them too far off the road.

Some folks may have older maps that wouldn't have the streets or parking lots on them if you try to do front door locations. My GPS isn't the greatest if it thinks the poi is in the middle of the field. It will try and route you to the closest road access it has.

Most folks should be smart enough to find the front door if you get them to the parking lot road intersection. Feedback from users will fix any problems if they are confusing.

Daniel

That's just happened to me while trying to get to the Flying J in Gillette, WY. The road closest to the POI coordinates was the eastbound off-ramp of I-90. I was traveling westbound, so my GPS told me to go past the correct exit, get off at the next one, then get back on I-90 heading eastbound, get off at the correct exit, then make a right turn in the middle of the off-ramp (which was, of course, impossible). It was an unwelcome nuisance after a long day of driving. If only I'd noticed the "Flying J" sign in time to get off at the correct exit in the first place....

That happen to me too. Put the cursor too closed to the front door and it picked up the street in the rear of the bldg istead of the front. I should have put the cursor at the entrance of the parking lot.

When I was in NJ, I picked a Target and followed the directions. I knew it wasn't good when Karen said to get on the Turnpike...

Took another 20 or so minutes to correct the route from that point.

No system is perfect, all we can do is work on improving what we have.

My nuvi freaked out trying to find a friends house. I got it so it would work by searching for a point I put in (using coordinates from Google) in his driveway. I had to mess with it trying different points and then checking the turns until it would work. It kept wanting to go on streets that located you behind his house where you would have to walk up a hill through to woods to get there.

From that experience, I would suggest you might want to look at the nuvi directions before concluding your coordinates are the ones you want to stick with. But the driveway worked for this too but it had to be a bit back off the street. It could have been because the first 100 feet where shared with another house.

Tell us how you got the coordinates from Google. I assume you put your friends address into Google and then zoomed in as far as you could.

When I use Googlemaps and put in my address, the marker in in my backyard (even tho a little " yellow star" was at the intersection of my driveway and the road (which was what I would have wanted it). I can right-click and select "Drop Latlng Marker" to have Googlemaps put coordinates where I want point the coordinates.

When I put my Mom's house in google it places the marker in a field on the property about 3/4 mile back. We own about 30 acres. The marker is not even close to where the house is, but it is still on the property but the furthest point back.

When assigning points. I tried to change a few stores to more "correct" coordinates in one shopping center and despite being about a quarter of a mile from the front (parking lot) entrance, it's routing me to the back entrance of the shopping center (which is even further away)

I recently navigated to a UPS store in Hopewell Junction, NY with the UPS_Store_USA.csv file from Mahoney. It took me to a shopping strip mall but I didn't see the store. Asking directions I found out there was a strip mall behind the strip mall. So I sent the front door coordinates to Mahoney. I didn't think about navigating to it to see if the GPS now brings me to the woods behind the store. I will check this out later today.

*Good intentions may be a bad thing here*