Friday, July 26, 2013

Fantastic Bridges

This was pointed out to me by someone else, it's an odd glitch in google maps.


  The map shows south Brooklyn. Manhattan Beach is on the east-end of a  bit of land on the southern base of Brooklyn, with Coney Island at the west-end. The long strip at the bottom of the screen capture is a barrier island, made up of  Breezy Point and the Rockaways.  This map shows a bridge extending from Breezy Point into Manhattan Beach. There's no such bridge.


Here we're zoomed in on the north end of the 'bridge', and it actually is shown running into the CUNY Kingsborough Community College campus.
In fact a big chunk of the campus here is mysteriously shown as under water.
There's nothing like any of this in the satellite view, shown below.

Outside of this being a weird map rendering issue---and the error is not normally there, I've checked this map before---my first thought was, maybe it's a projection involving potential sea-level rise. But that wouldn't explain the "bridge", which is also rather wide for a bridge. Plus, the campus has a high sea-wall running all around it, so if the south end of it was flooded, the whole campus should be flooded. Water could be coming in to the west, off campus, and run into campus, but I'd think if that was the case then there'd be more flooding overall. Anyway, it's probably not the case that 'someone' at Google accidentally put in data from some imaginary flood scenario into the standard Google Map.



I actually wish this bridge did exist, it'd be better taking the Southern Parkway and driving through the Rockaways, and then over this bridge, than taking the dread Belt Parkway.

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