Tele Atlas Responds to Seattle/Oakland Highway Situations

Update: The AP assesses how the main players did in responding:

It took Yahoo nearly 39 hours to suggest new routes. Google Maps was updated late Monday night. MapQuest Inc., a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc.‘s AOL, began suggesting detours late Tuesday night.

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The Seattle PI followed upon how Google, Yahoo and MapQuest did in re-routing traffic when the city’s University Bridge was shut down after a water main break. In this case,

...a spokeswoman for Google Inc. said data underlying the maps and directions isn’t updated quickly enough to be reflected hours later, and usually isn’t updated at all for short closures.

Google uses NAVTEQ data for Seattle, but there’s no input from that company in the article. However, the articles looks at the situation in Oakland, where a large chunk of highway fell and won’t be repaired for some time. Here’s how Tele Atlas found out about and reacted to that situation:

...Web-crawling software began compiling news articles, online postings and transportation department bulletins about the Oakland disaster moments after it happened.

...

On Monday, Tele Atlas asked one of its local field agents to drive to the collapsed highway in Oakland and take digital photos. When Tele Atlas confirmed which stretch of highway was out of commission, it fixed the database.

“We never act on just a news article itself,” said Dan Adams, vice president of operations for map-data provider Tele Atlas. “We need to go through a series of questions to understand the impact, the closure time, the target dates for reopening and a lot of other details.”

Good to know TA has its own intelligence system on such matters. Also, good to know it verifies what it hears. The one missing part of the story: how quickly will those who use TA maps update their data to the newest available from the company?

[Disclosure: I am a contractor for Tele Atlas.]