I ask Maps/Siri for directions to work, a place I go 5 days out of 7, to get advice on which route to take depending on traffic (in Southern California, this varies more than you’d think).
I work on a college campus where most of the buildings don’t have street addresses (there’s no driving inside the campus). My work mailing address has a street address that is at one corner of the university. Where I actually work (and associated parking) is located along one edge of the campus fairly close by.
Ideally I’d like to use Siri but here are the various behaviors I get either typing things into Maps or asking Siri for directions.
When I type in the mailing address, it picks the middle of campus. Since you can’t actually drive to that location, it does the best it can but that results in directions to the wrong side of the campus entirely and often highly non-optimal routes.
If I ask Siri for directions to the street address (e.g. “1212 Main St.”), it picks a location that’s fairly close to that actual address.
If I type in or ask Siri for directions to , it picks the middle of campus again.
When I type in “Work”, it shows a brown icon for Work that is where I actually work because I’ve edited it to do so. In the process of doing this, I ended up with multiple “Work” locations which I had to go delete in Settings/Privacy/Location Services/System Services/Significant Locations. There’s one that I’ve renamed “Work2” because it will not let me delete it.
When I ask Siri to give me directions to “Work”, it picks the center of campus.
What I’d like is to have both asking Siri or typing in “Work” give me the location I’ve edited as “Work” or, failing that, the actual mailing address (which would be close enough and, is coincidentally what Siri tells me she’s giving me).
Use the report a problem feature to have Apple correct/add an entry for your specific building. You can use the report a problem feature to even indicate where exactly on the map the desired location is.
This may take several weeks, but I think this is your best bet. Unless there’s an actual physical address say, a block or two away, that you can get it to navigate to, you’re never going to be able to force Maps to do the right thing because it clearly lacks the correct data.
Could you drop a pin in Maps at the location you want to park then add that as a new contact (e.g. Work Parking)? Then ask Siri to navigate to the name assigned to that contact.
I tested this and the behavior is just as @boxspring describes. I have a similar work situation, but my building’s physical address and the “official” address, although different, are close enough that there’s never been a problem. I dropped a pin on my building, yet the address in Maps defaults to the official address. I even entered the exact latitude and longitude into Maps: same result.
I think the suggestion offered by @Scottisloud is probably the best option. I think Apple uses the USPS addresses (just as all the GPS apps do) and there is only one official USPS address for his campus, with all internal mail delivery being done by University employees. Perhaps if enough people have and report this issue, they will make the change.
I dropped a pin where I park, saved the location and maps assigned a street address (I park on the street, but there isn’t a building there). I use that as my ‘work’ address in contacts. Works fine for me.
I also have ‘home’ and ‘school’.
Not sure if this is helpful…
This is what I ended up doing, with a twist. I added the address of the parking garage (which, unlike many of the buildings on campus, actually has a distinct street address) to my contact as an address with the custom label “Work Parking”. Now I can ask Siri “Directions to my work parking” and it does the right thing.
It’s still a little frustrating that there can be an editable map icon labeled “Work” that, despite my editing it, still doesn’t take priority over “the campus as a whole”, but I’ve got something that works and I’m tired of thinking about this particular problem.
