I think this is less Organic vs Google than OpenStreetMap's data set vs Google's. I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.

> I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.

I expect that Google never saw a market in trail mapping. I also assume no Google employee took an interest in trails as a 10% project. Google Maps doesn't really do much for topography either.

Google Earth can be good for trail mapping, but that has basically atrophied since it was acquired from Keyhole.

Yeah, but the thing is that I don't think any of this data is "self-collected". I suspect that OSM gets most of its US trail data (or at least western state trail data) from the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. I also suspect that incorporating such a data source into Google Maps is relatively trivial, but they just seemed to have done so.

I map many trails on osm from personal site surveys and a combination of sat imagery and my gpx files. No way google is doing that because there is no one to steal the data from. It was me, the enthusiast that put it in osm directly. That’s just me and the trails I load tho. Example - Latest was short one at monkeyface falls. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/34.098058/-116.955639

I hike on trails in New Mexico, and I find the existing trail data on osmand/OSM to be astoundingly accurate. I had concluded that NSF/BLM must have data.

So few people hike these trails that I do not believe they were entered one by one. The one "trail" I hiked that was entered by someone I deleted later that day, because it should not have been shown as a trail.