With all the time and energy cartographers spend preparing
maps, it makes sense that they would want to protect their investment.
One of the ways they do so — although they don’t always admit it — is by
including “trap streets,” deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch
unsuspecting copyright violators. These may include fake streets, as the
name suggests, but the term is also applied to other erroneous
cartographic data included to embarrass those who might steal it.
Usually, these “mistakes” are minor: tiny (and entirely false) bends in
rivers and roads, or slightly altered mountain elevations.
The TeleAtlas Directory, the basis for Google Maps, is said to have included several trap streets. According to a 2012 article in Cabinet,
Moat Lane once curved its way through North London, at least in the
regular view of on Google Maps, although the satellite layer revealed
that the place where the lane was supposed to exist was a disparate
collection of trees and houses — there was no lane there at all.
Other TeleAtlas/Google Maps trap streets have included
Oxygen Street, which supposedly ran between two houses in Edinburgh (it
didn’t), Adolph-Menzel-Ring and Otto-Dix-Ring, both attached to
Wiesenstrasse in Zeuthen, Germany (they weren’t), and Kerbela Street,
which purportedly ran through the Shropshire Learners & Driving
Instructor Training Center in Shrewsbury, England (it never existed).
Perhaps the strangest trap street is the phantom town of Argleton,
England, which appeared on Google Maps as recently as 2009. Online
listings showed the town as having jobs, real estate, weather forecasts,
and even a single scene. But no one had ever set foot there, because it
doesn’t exist. Google has since removed the town from their listings,
and though many speculate that it was a town-wide version of a trap
street, the company wouldn’t reveal if its inclusion was a deliberate
attempt to catch thieves.
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