Two years ago, my brother was getting married, and he had asked me to help design his invitations and the maps showing how to get from the church to the restaurant where we were holding the rehearsal dinner. I used to be a professional cartographer, so making a map was not a problem, particularly since online mapping has made it easy enough that any internet user could do it. I was going to find a nice map image and then paste it up with page layout software to print up directions.
Despite being very careful, I ended up making an incorrect map, sending a caravan of cars containing tired, grumpy wedding participants off to the wrong place and my brother was ready to kill me.
My experience in getting an erroneous map from the web isn’t all that uncommon,
and most avid internet users have been tripped up at some point by errors found
in online mapping systems.
So, why do these mapping errors happen so frequently?