Uneasy Rhetoric

Just played around with Google maps and found some odd results.

First, just to test it, I looked for the driving directions from my favorite watering hole, the Bonnlair on 36th and J Streets, to Peace Market, a mini-mart in my old ‘hood, on 18th and O Streets. The directions it gave me were perfectly reasonable, making the best use of one-way streets. However, it said that the 1.8 mile distance would be covered in about three minutes.

That would mean I would have to average 36 miles per hour to get from A to B. No small feat considering the speed limit most of the way would be 30.

Second, I decided to make a slight shift and change the starting address from J Street to H Street and something funny happened. Inexplicably, the map decided to send me down O Street, a residential, two-way street with no stop lights and a 25mph speed limit, instead of L Street, a one-way thoroughfare. And it still said I could do the trip in four minutes.

But is Google maps any better than Yahoo maps? No. Yahoo maps gave me the same weird directions. What about Mapquest? Mapquest was better. It gave the same directions for the first set of addresses, but for the second set of addresses, it chose to send me down P Street, another one-way. Not the most efficient route, but better than either Yahoo or Google.

All of them seemed to think I could make the trip in six minutes or less. Fat chance.