SECAUCUS, New Jersey — As Chris Arcari gets off the New Jersey Turnpike’s brand new Exit 15X, green arrows join on a flat-screen monitor inside his SUV to form the beginnings of the ramp’s existence on a digital map.
In a white Ford Escape fitted with a video camera, a GPS receiver and a laptop, Arcari and partner Rob Ditko work to maintain the freshness and accuracy of mapping databases on which millions rely.
One wrong turn and, well, you get the picture.
As mapping technologies proliferate on websites, in mobile devices and inside automobiles, the work of these modern cartographers is essential.
During their December excursion off Exit 15X, the two men discover three new streets and a delivery access road.
“Times like these, we just explore,” Arcari says as he passes a new commuter rail station responsible for the new streets. “It’s our version of finding a brave new world. We’ll drive it until it connects to some point (already) in the database.”
Riding shotgun, Ditko uses his pen tablet to denote an overpass, which appears as brackets on the display above the four-wheel-drive vehicle’s gear shift. Later, he writes in the name of a new street, South Road.
Information gleaned from the green arrows, hand markings and video images ultimately go into databases maintained by Navteq and sent quarterly to such internet mapping providers as America Online’s MapQuest, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google and in-car navigation developers like TomTom International.
Developers of the map applications can then apply their own touches, such that directions offered by Yahoo between the same two points may differ from MapQuest’s, even though both use the same data from Navteq and its main competitor, Tele Atlas.
Online maps have come a long way.
“Users even five years ago were still just amazed you can get driving directions from point A to point B,” says Jeremy Kreitler, Yahoo’s senior product manager for maps. “They were OK if every once in a while, it took you down the wrong street or didn’t know about a new housing development.”
David Reese, 61, who lives in Florida’s growing Sarasota County, had to call a friend for directions recently because the man’s street was so new. Although digital maps improve mightily on the fold-out paper variety, Reese says, people have become spoiled.
“People expect everything to be 100 percent exact because things are so close to being so,” he says. “When something doesn’t work 100 percent, they complain.”
No longer satisfied with driving directions, consumers are also demanding information on a neighborhood’s restaurants, public transportation options and even real-time traffic conditions.
People generate maps on mobile devices for hikes and errands, and they want maps for locations outside North America and Western Europe, too, where coverage can be spotty.
All that translates into greater demand on Navteq and Tele Atlas to make their databases even more accurate and complete.
“Maps are truly ever-changing,” says Jay Benson, Tele Atlas’ vice president for business planning in North America.
Tele Atlas consults more than 40,000 sources, including state and local transportation departments, planning boards and motor vehicle agencies. Field analysts also monitor county growth rates, housing construction data and aerial images.
Where maps are already available from a reliable source — an aerial image, a government agency, perhaps a utility company — Tele Atlas will use that. But where there are discrepancies, Benson says, the company often sends a van with a driver and a half-dozen video cameras from which computers extract key information.
Tele Atlas, based in the Netherlands, spends tens of millions of dollars each year in North America alone to freshen its databases, currently more than 12 trillion bytes in size.
Chicago-based Navteq employs 514 field analysts in North America and Europe. They drove more than 3.5 million miles combined in 2004.
“It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge,” says John MacLeod, Navteq’s executive vice president for global marketing and strategy. “You spend a year painting it and you have to start over again. It’s a never-ending challenge.”
It all starts in Arcari’s Escape, or one of hundreds like it around the world.
From the outside, save for a global positioning system antenna that resembles a police siren on top, the Escape looks like any other SUV.
But in the back is a bolted cabinet containing a GPS receiver attached to the antenna, a laptop docking station, power supply and cables snaking through the vehicle’s interior to connect with the computer display and video camera up front.
The GPS setup feeds latitude and longitude information several times a second, plotted on the display as green arrows that connect to form digital roads. The camera captures three frames a second, enough to reconstruct road signs and other details.
In the databases, roads are broken into line segments, each carrying as many as 160 attributes — such things as road quality (ranging from 1 for major arteries to 5 for local streets), presence of a divider or center turn lanes, speed limits and addresses of buildings along each side.
There are fields to note one-way and turn restrictions, and whether they are limited to certain times, such as weekdays only between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Any special rules for trucks, taxis and even bikers and pedestrians can be marked.
Tele Atlas operates in a similar fashion.
There, 6 million miles of North American roads appear as 60 million line segments, each described by where it starts and ends and how it curves. Divided highways and ramps have separate segments, as do feeder roads that parallel a main thoroughfare. There’s also data on landmarks, statues and other points of interest.
Both companies have been digitizing maps for about two decades, but only recently have GPS units, video cameras and laptops become central to the task.
“Six or seven years ago,” Ditko said, “we were writing on paper plots.”
