I know, it's a long shot, but I often notice mapping errors in City Navigator maps (routing the wrong way through a one-way street, a road being unpaved instead of paved, wrong speed limit, you name it). The process of reporting an error like that is a) not known to many of the users and b) not very intuitive.
What if you could click on a road in Basecamp and select Advanced -> Report error? Basecamp would highlight the clicked map segment/vector and display it's attributes and make it possible to propose new values for the attributes and/or add/delete attributes. The proposed change would then be mailed/uploaded to the Garmin carthography deparment for revision.
The advantages for this are:
- more map errors are reported, in the end giving better mapping data
- the map segment/vector can be clearly identified, instead of users using arbitrary coordinates in an e-mail, which saves a lot of guessing and searching by the Cartography department
- the proposed change only has valid attributes, not an arbitrary text, saving time once again
- the proposed changes can be filtered, so map segments with multiple reports can be processed first and if many people report the same change makes it more probable it is a correct change
- the feature can also be used to check why a route is doing weird stuff ;)
There also are disadvantages (as always):
- this will create more work for the Cartography department, since it will get more proposed changes
- users can spam use this feature to report false changes
- this can leak mapping attributes (but it will take a lot of work to get users to "copy" a map), so maybe not all attibutes shold be shown (only user recognizable ones)
This is a bit like the TomTom system of user changes to maps, but I propose it to be incorporated into the normal mapping error reporting workflow and only making it easier to report bugs.
