Apple moved the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital

Apple moved the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital

I was digging around through Apple Maps on my old phone which runs iOS 6 in search of even more broken stuff. If you missed my older posts, be sure to check them out: 1 2 3

What got me looking for it was actually the new iOS 7 maps icon. It seems to show Interstate 280 going across the lower-left with a green square at top (a park?) and a pink square at top right (a hospital?). I tried to find a spot which resembles that somewhere along the entirety of 280 but failed.

This got me looking for other pink spots, though, and I found one in a most unusual place: right next to Mission College in Santa Clara. Here's what I saw while relatively zoomed-out:

OK, so that's GAP at Mission College. Great America is in the right place, IHOP is right, Togo's is close, Bennigan's looks okay... but what's that pink blob? Is that supposed to be a hospital? I zoomed in.

WTF? Stop the presses! The Lucile Packard Children's Hospital has been picked up and flown from Palo Alto to Santa Clara! Are they serious?

No, there's no hospital there. Trust me. Look at it on Street View or whatever if you want. It is NOT A HOSPITAL.

I pulled up the info page to see what was going on.

According to their data source, LPCH is at 2807 Mission College Blvd. That's the right address for that building, but they are certainly NOT there. They are still up in Palo Alto, on the Stanford campus (surprise surprise).

So how in the hell did Apple get this address? I did some more digging.

It turns out that 2807 Mission College is a data center... you know, a "co-lo". It will hold lots and lots of computers... but no patients, for it is definitely not the children's hospital, and it never has been.

So how did Apple get this mapping? A little more digging turned that up. Netcraft had the answer.

The LPCH, not surprisingly, has a domain name called lpch.org. Once upon a time, it was hosted at a data center... at 2807 Mission College Blvd in Santa Clara. Yes. That's where they got the mapping: the web site's network address.

Imagine driving a kid to a data center when they get sick.

Does this sound familiar? It's the second hospital they got completely wrong just in Santa Clara. I reported on the first one back in my third post about Apple Maps back on May 12th. They still have the Kaiser hospital at the location which closed in August 2007, and by that, I mean right now as I'm writing this a month later.

That's two bad hospital entries in a relatively small city. What other important things have they dropped or relocated based on crap data?