I can't find it now (so it may be an apocryphal story), but an Australian man went to one of these places, didn't find it and decided to set up shop. It was already on the map, so he figured that it might as well actually exist.
Trap Street
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Re: Trap Street
#12When you want to sell your data because it's so valuable people will pay money for it... But you don't want people to copy it, so you fill it full of garbage. It's a bit like Walmart adding a little bit of sewage to their consumer goods so people are less likely to shoplift. Don't worry, the baby formula only has 3 grams of human fecal matter in it!
It's more an equivalent of a RFID tag. Sometimes placed in the middle of a printed page of a book, or irremovable in other ways so others are wondering whether you actually bought the item, but oh well...
Re: Trap Street
#13Is this concept living in the age of satellites? What is a moral side of doing map which is not going to work in 0.0001% case?
Re: Trap Street
#14Is this concept living in the age of satellites? What is a moral side of doing map which is not going to work in 0.0001% case?
There's a subtle art to telling geographic lies that ultimately don't matter. Overpasses which go over a few extra dead ends on paper but miss in reality. Any underground passageway is easy simple to fudge so long as it connects the right ends. An extra footpath in a cemetery full of of winding unmarked footpaths. A spare non-public road in a closed off industrial facility. So many ways
Re: Trap Street
#15Not to be confused with a trap house. Edit: okay, downvote me, but English is absurd sometimes. Imagine trying to teach a person who doesn't know English at all, from first principles, the extreme difference between a trap street and a trap house in common USA slang vernacular.
I was wondering if this was going to be about a high trafficking area.
Re: Trap Street
#16Related: (are there others?) Trap Street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17738847 - Aug 2018 (21 comments) Trap street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992748 - Jan 2013 (22 comments) South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818584 - Nov 2012 (46 comments) Not a Word: The story of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504126…
Why do maps show places that don't exist [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769492 - May 2023 (1 comment)
Re: Trap Street
#17Is this concept living in the age of satellites? What is a moral side of doing map which is not going to work in 0.0001% case?
> Is this concept living in the age of satellites?
It is even worse in the age of Digital Rights Management were you buy something and do not own it. A fake detour in a map with hundreds of thousands seems mild in comparison.
Re: Trap Street
#18I found this the most interesting part:
> Trap streets are not copyrightable under the federal law of the United States. In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. (1992), a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated."
Re: Trap Street
#19Isn't this bad for travellers who use maps to navigate ?
Re: Trap Street
#20I spent a number of years in mapping, global reconcillation of pre-WGS84 ellipsoids and datums with post GPS unification, national mapping projects etc. There are many map arcana tales, yet another reason for "trap streets" - fake data infill, is to realistically fill voids left by top secret classified national security areas. The UK Ordnance Survey famously produced rich detailed maps across all of the United Kingd…
> The UK Ordnance Survey famously produced rich detailed maps across all of the United Kingdom .. save for blank voids over naval shipyards, weapons testing, secret nuclear bunkers, etc
The US/UK BMEWS station at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire used to be omitted from OS maps. Utterly pointless as there were three huge 40m+ high radomes on the site, which was next to a main road.