NWS -- according to rumor -- deliberately keeps their pages nerdy and undesigned due to pressure from commercial providers (AccuWeather, etc.), which don't want a government-supported a "rival". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties...) Forget that the government rival was there first. It's been awkward to get XML-ish data feeds from NWS, because private industry is trying to make money selling the same data which is freely available from NWS.
The private weather services don't provide much value. Most of the local current conditions data (METAR) is gov't sponsored, not to mention the satellite imagery. The government forecast algorithms are just great -- the gov't has a mandate to do this & does it well. It does make sense to go to a private provider if you have an oil rigs, agribusiness, etc. which needs tailored weather advisories.
The only place for good local weather which isn't cribbing or catching up with NWS is local meteorologists in difficult to judge regions. For example in the hill country of northern Vermont, the Eye on the Sky forecasters will call the weather valley by valley, a luxury which NWS computers won't give.
Do you think any A/B testing or science went into the new design? Was this design chosen because it was cool, or because it optimized advertising click-throughs?
I ask because I too find myself returning to NOAA (especially their 2-day graph gasp Java applet) as a definitive (if not deeply hidden) best source for weather info, and I lament the horrific local TV station weather user experiences are foisting on people. Attention TV meteorologists: many of you have a big enough following and brand to form and monetize your own sites (TV contract-permitting).
I don't know... 99% of the really thin streets in the examples do seem to be "dead end" streets. I think you just found an error (which wouldn't surprise me, given how many minor errors I've found on Google Maps in the past year).
There was a time in U.S. history when it wasn't uncommon for several generations to be living together under the same roof. All of this "oh, he's twenty-three, why's he still living with his parents?" non-sense would sound very, very strange to someone from yesteryear.
Example: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=41.893077299131...