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Trap street

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Re: Trap street

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Google Maps directed me down a trap street once on the way to a new tutoring gig. I got lost, was late, and had to sheepishly call the family to ask for directions. Just glad I had a printout of the directions to show them. Never used it for anything essential after that. Thanks a lot, Google Maps. You'd think they'd have the decency to add a "don't route down this street" flag to their trap streets.

That doesn't really make any sense: "trap streets" make sense and are used in, say, the base map that you see when viewing a Google map (that is, in the raster data). But why would Google bother putting a trap street into their own (proprietary) street data used for routing? Unless you are saying that Google Maps "directed" you in the sense that you were looking at a printout of a map that included a trap street, not…

I agree, it doesn't make any sense. But it happened. This was back in '07 or so, so before Google did live turn-by-turn. I had a printout of Google's directions from online.

It led me on a street that's never existed, and that would have had to go either over or through a very substantial hill to actually exist.

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