February 22, 2020
COULD BE WORSE (self-reference alert):
When a county changed a Confederate highway name, some navigation apps were slow to change it (Andrew Zaleski, Feb. 18, 2020, Washington Post)
If you were driving through Arlington in September, you might have noticed a change that was almost five years in the making: Jefferson Davis Highway was no more. Instead, the stretch of U.S. Route 1 that runs through Crystal City -- where Jeff Bezos's Amazon empire is setting up a new headquarters -- had been renamed Richmond Highway. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)In renaming the road, Arlington was following Alexandria, where another portion of Route 1 lies; in 2018, the city council there unanimously voted to change the name of its stretch of Jefferson Davis Highway to Richmond Highway. Arlington's leaders would have acted sooner, but, because Arlington is a county, not a city, it wasn't clear whether they could do so without approval from Virginia's General Assembly. And so they were stymied until March 2019, when the state attorney general issued a legal opinion that said Arlington could bypass the legislature. "It felt great," Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey told reporters in September. "We are at a point now where we don't have to have these monumental signs hanging over the streets of Arlington."But soon after the change, some drivers in Arlington noticed that when they typed a Richmond Highway address into Apple Maps, the app kept redirecting them to Richmond Highway in Alexandria. By contrast, Google Maps -- the most widely used navigation app, with about 150 million monthly users -- began employing the new name in January 2019, almost nine months before it went into effect.This problem persisted for several months on Apple Maps, the third most widely used navigation app, with about 20 million monthly users. (As of press time, it will take you to Richmond Highway in Arlington, but only if you also type "Arlington.") The news didn't exactly stop traffic. A comment on a Sept. 10 story about the glitch on the hyperlocal site ARLnow.com summed up the public reaction: "Way to bury the lead! People actually using Apple Maps is a bigger story here."Still, the incident points to ways in which maps, even in our digital age, can struggle to keep up with changing political realities on the ground. Satellites, after all, are indifferent to whether naming a highway after a Confederate leader in the early 1900s was a form of intimidation at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was spreading nationwide.
When I worked at an ur-digital mapping company in the 90s, one of the more unpleasant tasks was going through the database and changing offensive names, nearly all in the South and using the "n" word, like Dead "N"word Skull Creek.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2020 6:08 PM