On phantom businesses and phantom toll roads

Perhaps you missed it, but they moved Fork & Company off of MoPac Boulevard last week.We've got a plastic card to suit you. Keller Williams Realty, too.

But if you look in the right places, you can still find Cedar Valley Grocery just yards from MoPac near Lady Bird Lake and, on Interstate 35 between the main lanes and the frontage road just north of East 51st Street, a Radio Shack. You never know when you might want to reach out the window at 65 mph and buy some ear buds.

And then there’s “Tran Steven,” an optometry practice, which is apparently smack dab in the southbound lanes of MoPac (Loop 1) not far from the Cedar Valley Grocery.

Convenient, if perhaps a little hair-raising for eye examinations. But also, like the other examples above, nonexistent. The optometrist involved is actually Steven Tran, and his office is miles away. There’s no grocery store down by Austin High School and no electronics store at that I-35 location.

Spend much time on Google’s map feature, as a transportation reporter tends to do, and you will find businesses shown in some very odd places. I first noticed this a couple of weeks ago with Fork & Company when I was working on a column about the upcoming MoPac express lane project. What turned out to be a catering concern owned by Chera Little was shown on Google in an area between the southbound lanes and Winsted Lane, somewhere around West Seventh Street.

It’s not sitting on MoPac anymore either. I contacted Google’s press relations office about this phantom establishment, and, to my surprise, a representative of the giant corporation called me back. Who knew they even had phones?

Deanna Yick, the spokeswoman, was very apologetic about the misplacement of Fork & Company. I assured her that this was a light-hearted call, that we weren’t exactly in Woodward and Bernstein territory here.

“It is a big deal for us,” Yick said. “We definitely want to get it right.”

I asked her to explain the process Google uses to locate businesses on its maps. Is it advertising?

No, she said, Google doesn’t solicit or accept payments from companies for the privilege of appearing on the maps. Instead, Google collects information from a variety of sources,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. pours it into the corporation’s inscrutable software machinery and then the maps come out the other side. Perhaps the machinery could use a tuneup.

I told her about a few other such glitches I had found along MoPac, and sure enough they were all gone from the maps within a day or two. But I didn’t tell her about the nonexistent Radio Shack, the grocery or the eye guy. Didn’t want to spoil all the fun for you folks.

While we’re talking about map oddities, did you see that local transportation planners would like to put tolls on East 11st Street between I-35 and San Jacinto Boulevard?

OK, I’ll wait while you clean up the Cap’n Crunch you just spit all over the counter. Ready? I’ll explain.

A partnership that includes the city of Austin, Capital Metro and some other Central Texas transportation entities in 2011 formed something called Project Connect. The undertaking, working with consultants and an appointed group of political and civic leaders called the Transit Working Group, over about a year’s time produced a complicated map showing a future network of rail lines, rapid bus routes and “express lanes.”

The vision map includes dotted brown linesrunning from I-35 to near the Capitol on East 11th and from MoPac to near the Seaholm Power Plant downtown. That line east of MoPac is north of the Union Pacific railroad, which would make it appear to be West Fifth Street or West Sixth Street, or both.

That would be particularly ironic given what I wrote last week in this column, which is that the city would rather those future MoPac express lanes not even be connected to West Fifth, much less extend along it.

I talked about all this to Karla Villalon,Comprehensive Wi-Fi and RFID tag by Aeroscout to accurately locate and track any asset or person. the primary spokeswoman for the city’s Transportation Department. No, she told me, no one involved in Project Connect envisions putting tolls on either East 11th, or West Fifth and West Sixth.

The map is purely schematic, she told me, and those extended express lane segments are meant only to signify “connectivity” between downtown and the toll lanes out on the highways. All that indicates, in other words, is that transit buses using those express toll lanes could take those routes to final destinations in the central business district.Wear a whimsical Disney ear cap straight from the Disney Theme Parks!Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.

Well, OK. But an uninformed map reader easily could interpret it more literally, and that might lead to some ticklish phone calls later about tollways flowing past Symphony Square, El Arroyo and Waterloo Records.