Trap Street Secrets Reveal Why Maps Lie

When you unfold a city guide or pinch-to-zoom on your phone, you treat the lines on the screen as absolute truth. You assume the roads exist, the towns are real, and the geometry matches the earth beneath your feet. But according to Atlas Obscura, cartographers frequently insert deliberate lies into the geography of your world to protect their investment. These phantom settlements and fake roads serve a defensive purpose. They turn a navigational tool into a weapon against intellectual property theft. A trap street is a falsehood designed to catch a thief. 

The High Price of Accuracy 

Making a reliable map requires sweating over the smallest details, while stealing one takes seconds. As Metricop notes, field surveys demand immense physical labor and financial investment, requiring teams to haul heavy kits like total stations, theodolites, and levels across rough terrain. They must calculate triangulation and wait on slow-responding government bodies to confirm boundary lines for planned roads. A report by Tucker Engineering adds that this process burns through time and budget due to labor costs and the need to wait on slow-responding government bodies to confirm boundary lines. A rival company can skip the mud and the math by simply tracing a finished product. This creates a massive financial incentive for plagiarism. To prove theft, the original creators need a unique fingerprint. If a competitor copies a map, they unknowingly copy the errors too. 

Big Think reports that the A-Z map company is rumored to include approximately one mistake per page, totaling about 100 traps across the book. These errors act as a quiet alarm. The only way a competitor includes that specific error is if they stole the data directly. The cost of a fresh survey is high, but the cost of getting caught in a trap street lawsuit can be higher. 

Designing the Perfect Lie 

A good disguise works best when nobody notices the actor is wearing a mask. Mapmakers must balance deception with utility. A trap street cannot block your path or ruin your drive. If a driver hits a dead end because of a fake road, the map fails its primary job. Makers use subtle tricks instead. They might pinch a road width or slightly bend a curve that should be straight. Sometimes they misspell a name on purpose. These tiny flaws act as evidence. If a rival map features the exact same "mistake," the theft is undeniable. 

This concept mirrors the role of extras in a film. Fictitious settlements are designed to blend into the background. Detection implies a failure of the disguise. The error must be small enough to ignore but unique enough to stand up in court. Why do maps have fake streets? Mapmakers insert fake streets to prove ownership if a competitor copies their unique data. The goal is to create a counter-intuitive form of security: brilliance through absurdity. 

Famous Fakes: The Michigan Rivalry 

Ego and tribalism often drive these camouflaged signatures just as much as copyright law does. As detailed by AnnArbor.com, the official state map of Michigan in 1978 included two curious towns: "Goblu" and "Beatosu," inserted by a State Highway Commission chairman to show loyalty to his alma mater. These were not real communities. They were a nod to the University of Michigan’s sports rivalry with Ohio State: "Go Blue" and "Beat OSU." The map chairman, an alumnus of the university, used his power to embed a permanent jeer at his rivals. 

Similarly, a map of Boulder County, Colorado, in the early 1970s featured a peak named "Mount Richard." No such mountain existed. The creator, Richard Ciacci, simply drafted his name onto the topography. These examples highlight how personal pride often mixes with professional protection. While some traps guard revenue, others simply immortalize the maker. 

The Legend of Agloe, New York 

Some lies are so convincing that reality eventually bends to match them. The Guardian recounts that in the 1930s, General Drafting Corporation founders Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers mixed their initials to create a fake settlement called "Agloe" at a dirt-road intersection in the Catskills. It was a paper town, existing only in ink. For decades, it sat there as a landmine for any lazy competitor. 

Years later, the trap seemed to catch a big fish. Rand McNally released a map featuring Agloe. General Drafting attacked immediately, claiming copyright infringement. But Rand McNally had a surprising defense. Their surveyors had driven to that intersection and found a building. 

A shop owner had seen "Agloe" on an old Exxon map distributed by General Drafting. Assuming the map was accurate, he named his business the Agloe General Store. What is a paper town on a map? A paper town is a fictional settlement created by cartographers to catch copyright violators. In this case, the fake town became a real place because a resident believed the lie. The lawsuit failed because the fiction had manifested into physical reality. 

The Ghost Town of Argleton 

Digital maps amplify errors until an empty field looks like a bustling neighborhood. In 2010, sharp-eyed users spotted a town called Argleton in Lancashire, England, within Google Maps. It looked completely legitimate. Listings for weather reports, dating services, and real estate appeared online for this specific location. The data suggested a thriving community. Yet, visitors who drove to the coordinates found nothing but an empty field. 

Argleton was deleted from Google Maps shortly after its exposure. Theories range from it being a deliberate "bait" for competitors like Bing to it being a legacy trap inherited from Tele Atlas data. The incident revealed a strange contradiction. Digital records allow a town to exist in cyberspace regardless of its absence from the physical world. The listings and data points gave Argleton a heartbeat, even if it had no pulse. 

Legal Shields and Blunt Swords 

The law often cares more about public access to facts than the effort it took to collect them. In the United States, a trap street offers weak protection. The Supreme Court ruling in Feist v. Rural established that facts are ineligible for copyright. Later cases like Nester's v. Hagstrom (1992), highlighted by T. Howard Law, ruled that "false facts" are also not protectable because reproducing actual facts would otherwise risk violating copyright. Courts argue that distributing false information hinders public knowledge. If a mapmaker inserts a lie, and a competitor copies it, the US legal system often shrugs. 

The United Kingdom takes a different stance. In 2001, the Automobile Association (AA) paid Ordnance Survey £20,000,000 to settle a copyright dispute. The evidence relied on "stylistic fingerprints" rather than fake towns. The AA had copied specific road widths and design choices. Are copyright traps legal in maps? In the US, copyright traps are legal to include but often fail to win lawsuits, while UK courts have upheld them more strictly. The rarity of litigation suggests that these traps function primarily as warnings rather than active landmines. 

Beyond Geography: The Mountweazel 

Dictionaries and encyclopedias use the same deceptive tactics to guard their words. This practice extends well beyond maps. Editors insert fake words, known as Mountweazels, into reference books. According to The New Yorker, the New Oxford American Dictionary invented the word "esquivalience"—not in 1975, but for its 2001 edition—to protect the copyright of its electronic version. An encyclopedia from 1903 listed "Zzxjoanw" as a Maori word for a drum. It was a complete fabrication. 

These linguistic traps function exactly like a trap street. They provide proof of copying in a market where data scraping is rampant. A competitor might claim they researched the definition of "esquivalience," but since the word does not exist outside that specific book, their defense collapses. 

Historical Vanishings and Marmots 

History is littered with islands that sailors chased but never found. Bermeja Island appeared on Spanish maps in the 16th and 17th centuries. It remained on nautical charts until 1921. But when the Mexican government sent a search vessel in 2009, the island was gone. It likely never existed, or it was a mapping error that survived for centuries. 

In 2011, Swisstopo released a map of the Swiss Alps with a peculiar detail. The contours of a remote mountain region were shaped to look like a marmot. This was not a functional error but a playful graphic signature. Like the "Goblu" town, it reminds us that humans draw our maps rather than impartial machines. 

The End of the Trap Street 

Collaborative verification kills the secrecy required for a successful lie. The rise of crowdsourcing threatens the traditional copyright trap. Platforms like Open Street Map rely on thousands of users to verify data. A fake street stands out immediately to locals who drive those roads daily. Cartographer Tim Lohnes notes that big data and user feedback make fictitious entries obsolete. 

Modern accuracy demands outweigh the need for secret signatures. If a navigation app sends a user to a fake street, the user switches apps. The competitive advantage now lies in precision, not protection. The time of the lonely paper town is fading as the digital crowd verifies every inch of the globe. 

The Map is Not the Territory 

From the accidental reality of Agloe to the empty fields of Argleton, maps have always blurred the line between data and fiction. Every map contains a negotiation between truth and ownership. Whether it is a sports rivalry tucked away in Michigan or a marmot hiding in the Swiss Alps, these secrets reveal the human hand behind the data. The trap street reminds us that the world on paper is never a perfect reflection of the ground beneath our feet. We navigate a world shaped as much by copyright law as by geology.