Joe White’s Blog

Marco Cantù today mentioned that Google Maps will give you driving directions from Italy to New York. Included in the directions is a step that says “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean — 5,572 km“.

To give you an idea of the kind of geek I am, I went on to look for other ocean routes that they support. Mainland to Hawaii? Nope, they can’t do it. U.S. to Australia? No can do.

Then I tried using Florida instead of New York. They routed me all the way up the East Coast. So apparently they only have a single route across the ocean, a single “road” if you will.

So then I tried to narrow down where this “road” starts and ends. (Am I scaring you yet?) I had two reasons for this: one, because I was curious; and two, because I wanted to know how long they thought the swim would take, so I could figure out how fast they think I can swim.

At this point, I found two bugs in Google Maps.

Bug #1: If you ask for a route directly from the starting point (Long Wharf, Boston) to the ending point (Terminal Grande-Bretagne, Le Havre, France), it doesn’t tell you to swim. It just tells you to “head south“. (Here’s a better version of the Google Maps swimming directions; it starts a block away, and does tell you to swim.)

Bug #2: They think you can make the 3,462-mile swim in 29 days 0 hours. Which means they think you can manage an average sustained pace of 5 miles an hour, or 2.2 meters per second, or 4.3 knots. Swimming. Average. If you swim 24 hours a day.

I mean, come on, guys. You could have at least done some research. The swim across the Atlantic actually takes 72 days.

(They also got the start and end cities wrong — it should have been Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Quiberon, France. But one mustn’t be too picky.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.