street view anomaly

as you may already know, madison, wi has been blessed as one of the newest cities to have the street view function added on google maps. this means that you can get a street level view for most streets in downtown madison. it is quite spectacular. google gets these images by driving around town in a van with a funny 360 degree camera on top.


this afternoon i was killing a couple minutes while waiting for the centrifuge to finish running. i went to madison.com an discovered a most interesting thing about the street view coverage of madison.

if you enter w gorham/state st. madison, wi into the search bar on google maps you will be brought to the corner of state and gorham. the street view at that location looks like this:
it is maxwell street days. folks are selling goods on the street. state street is blocked off. it appears to be a beautiful partly cloudy day.

here is where it gets interesting. it you "drive" even one address down in any direction along state or gorham it is no longer maxwell street days. the booths disappear, and the people retreat to their homes. the weather changes. it is a completely different day



i understand that it would take a number of days to photograph the entire city, but it would appear that the center of the intersection was the only place in the vicinity that they photographed that day. you would think that they would canvas an area, not pick out individual locations on different days. anyway, i thought it was neat.