Mapping Hacks

Sunday morning a gasoline tanker tipped over and caught on fire.   Unfortunately this caused a connector road which is mega-important to bay area traffic to collapse.

I got a call Sunday from Matt Petty at sfgate.com with a Google Earth question.  With a tiny bit of help from me they created a cool animation showing where the truck was driving, and when.

I just got an email from a PR firm working for Yahoo-I assume because of Mapping Hacks, saying that they had already updated their driving directions to route around the collapsed and closed section of freeway.

Here is how Yahoo now says to get to the Oakland airport from my house.  If you zoom in a bit near the Bay Bridge you can see the big loop skirting the damaged area.

I don’t know when Google updated their directions, but I don’t think Yahoo was particularly ahead of the game-they just have a PR person who had my email

I was surprised, as was apparantly the rest of the world, at how well commuters responded to the changed conditions.  I ranted a bit on the subject on another blog.

Posted in Uncategorized |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.