The end of the article talking about where the actual doors are reminds me a problem that we had to solve in a previous job: finding your way ON to the road network.
Take this address, for instance: "9901 Grant St, Thornton, CO 80229" It is a gigantic Walmart parking lot. When you ask a navigation system to get you back on the northbound interstate highway from here, it first needs to get you out of the parking lot and connected back to the road network. A naive system would just find the nearest road and tell you to drive in that direction. In this case, it would happily tell you to simply drive west a couple hundred meters to I-25 and take a right. It doesn't understand that there's a greenbelt and a retaining wall there. It doesn't understand that the correct answer is actually to go the opposite way -- east to Grant and around to an entrance ramp.
Google, by connecting parking lots to the road network has -- perhaps unintentionally -- made this problem go away.
Take this address, for instance: "9901 Grant St, Thornton, CO 80229" It is a gigantic Walmart parking lot. When you ask a navigation system to get you back on the northbound interstate highway from here, it first needs to get you out of the parking lot and connected back to the road network. A naive system would just find the nearest road and tell you to drive in that direction. In this case, it would happily tell you to simply drive west a couple hundred meters to I-25 and take a right. It doesn't understand that there's a greenbelt and a retaining wall there. It doesn't understand that the correct answer is actually to go the opposite way -- east to Grant and around to an entrance ramp.
Google, by connecting parking lots to the road network has -- perhaps unintentionally -- made this problem go away.
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