Talk:Trap street

Travellers' woes

I find it hard to believe that anyone has ever become lost looking for (or travelling on) a trap street, especially given this quote from the Straight Dope page: "Of course, the make-believe streets are little ones. The mythical avenues normally run no longer than a block, dead end, and are shown with broken lines (as though they are under construction)." So what's the deal with the "Travellers' Woes" section? Do we have evidence for this at all? Glenn Willen (Talk) [[]] 22:14, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

I can assure you that people do have trouble with trap streets. When I lived in Seattle, the most popular map of the area showed the street we lived on as going through, rather than as the dead-end it really was. Caused no end of trouble with relatives coming to visit: we were sure to get a call saying that they'd gotten off the freeway, and were at the McDonalds at the bottom of the hill; now where was the turn onto 80th Street? --Carnildo 22:14, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

This might as well be a genuine error rather than a trap street. Usually, you would expect traps to be something unique to the map like a made-up road name. Whether a street is through or closed at one end might change "quickly"; by contrast Lye Close doesn't suddenly show up in Bristol ... --Turbothy 21:25, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Hardly. We were at the top of a steep hill, while the McDonalds was at the bottom. If they were to put 80th through, they'd need to provide some sort of assistance to get cars up the 40-degree incline, and an extremely strong wall at the bottom to prevent out-of-control cars from causing problems on the freeway. --Carnildo 01:40, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

There are similar situations in Rome (Italy) and Hannover and Stuttgart (Germany) as well. A popular example in Rome is paths up on to the hill Gianicolo. Nearly all maps have a bunch of wide roads leading straight up from the city. In reality, it is far too steep for any road, and there is no way straight up from the old centre. An enormous amount of tourists mill around the bottom of the hill in the dead-ends every day trying to get up. It's quite ridiculous. 81.14.208.18 (talk) 13:05, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

One note--map services of Google, Yahoo, Mapquest, and Microsoft all include a street named (rather obviously) "Help Me" in Summerhaven, Arizona. I assume this is a trap street. Apart from the improbable name, it is a straight north-south street in an area of curving roads and is involved in several unlikely intersections. It also doesn't appear on aerial images, but seeing roads in forest isn't easy. This might be worth mentioning in the article as an easily-observed online example of the phenomenon. Paalexan 02:17, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

that's called an easter egg and has nothing to do with trap streets.88.117.117.4 (talk) 03:41, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Google maps

Google's maps have streets where there are no satellite photos in many places, due to the satellite photos being out of date and new streets having been built since they were taken —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.33.86.83 (talk) 01:50, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Other possible traps

One that I can imagine is a road whose classification is wrong: that outside the area of interest (a jurisdiction contiguous to the featured one but shown only in bordering areas) is unpaved in an area in which most roads are likely to be paved. Another possibility is that communities are misplaced and highway alignments are obsolete or otherwise misplaced.

Alignments of "proposed" highways pose another possible trap. These alignments are often highly speculative, and they are of little usefulness on a map. Alignment of a highway under construction might be useful knowledge a couple years later and is easily verified, but a "proposed" alignment can be changed or abandoned in response to political opposition or budgetary constraints and disappear altogether. Mapmakers can establish a proposed alignment anywhere they please for any purpose. One such purpose could be a copyright trap, so if someone copies the exact alignment of one mapmaker's fanciful "proposed highway" on his own map, then one has overwhelming evidence of a copyright violation. An example is of a "proposed turnpike" parallel to the Kansas/Missouri state line on maps by Goushã Corporation -- a highway never built -- whose inclusion on another map could constitute a copyright violation if it ever appeared on someone else's map.--Pbrower2a (talk) 18:51, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I jumped the gun and added my thoughts in the wrong spot, and should have written it here because the travesties that I had ran into in my life are the opposites of trap streets, like interstate hwy that runs all two or three blocks (state Highway 528), or my personal favorite, when my garmin GPS called sent my down a road that after a 100ft changed to gravel, then dirt, then straight up a hillside way too steep for a paved road and found myself is a fairly dangerous situation of trying to back down a muddy switchback in an Izuzu NPR 19ft box truck. The travesty of trap streets are very real, at least in they are in Springfield & Roseburg, Oregon.Dirtclustit (talk) 04:49, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Uncopyrightable

Street traps appear not to be copyrightable, at least under the federal law of the United States. This is idiotic. By this rationale, it ought not to be possible to copyright anything. The quoted objection entirely misses the point that people reproducing someone else's maps as if they were their own is the copyright violation itself, and the trap street merely the index of that violation - in other words, by including the original author's deliberate mistake, the violator shows he is merely copying someone else's work and not producing from his own survey. It's not copying the trap street that is the crime. Nuttyskin (talk) 16:09, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

It must be a horribly out of context quote, or maybe an outrageously paraphrased line written by someone who was thinking of something else when it was written and mistakenly put quotes around it, or something, I don't know, but I agree with you the part of the article that states

" Trap streets are not copyrightable under the federal law of the United States. In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992, a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright . . . . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)""

there is something that doesn't jive, at it really stinks because to verify the court case is real is possible, although a pain in the kneck, but the precedence sounds not very likely and the reasoning stated in quotes is enough to make me strike the "not copyrightable" entry from the record in it's entirety.But I ain't a judge Dirtclustit (talk) 04:39, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Speaking as a layman, this makes perfect sense to me. A Trap street is an intentional error in what is supposed to be a work of fact, and by itself not copyrightable. However, finding it in a competitor's product can still be used as evidence of copyright violation because there's no other reasonable explanation of how it got there. JDZeff (talk) 21:22, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

In Fiction?

There's an entry for "in fiction" for Fictitious entry, but not one for Trap Street. Given a mention of trap streets in a work of fiction (China Mieville's Kraken), should I create a section here for "in fiction" or put it in the fictitious entry article (a more general category that already has two examples)? Hactarcomp (talk) 19:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Radio show about trap streets

Looks like this page needs some more info. Here is a radio show that does a feature on trap streets. Hope it helps! http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2012/01/spark-169-january-22-25-2012/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.248.176.23 (talk) 18:33, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

The references do NOT use the phrase "Trap street"

That makes me wonder whether this article's title is "original research" and should be changed. 86.159.192.146 (talk) 02:51, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

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Real example

I've long been aware of a real Trap Street in Cheshire, England - the Red Lion at Lower Withington stands on the corner. Others exist too. Geopersona (talk) 08:00, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Do you have any secondary sources which describe these streets as trap streets? —Panamitsu (talk) 09:48, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Note sure what you mean - I'm simply giving an example from the real world of a road called Trap Street. It itself is not an example of a 'trap street'. Geopersona (talk) 16:02, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh I see. I don't think it'd be a good idea to include them in that case as the article is about trap streets, not streets named Trap, and per WP:NOTDICT. —Panamitsu (talk) 21:42, 28 February 2024 (UTC)