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In 2020, Berlin artist Simon Weckert walked a handcart carrying 99 second-hand smartphones and caused Google Maps to display a virtual traffic jam. The phones moved slowly together; the congestion appeared on the map, not as a matching road jam. The artwork showed how location signals can affect a traffic display, but it did not establish a 99-phone threshold or prove that the same stunt would work today.
What happened in the 99-phone Google Maps stunt?
Weckert’s project, Google Maps Hacks, involved pulling a handcart loaded with 99 second-hand phones through Berlin. Contemporary reporting said Google Maps represented the slow-moving cluster as congestion, turning the affected street red on the map. Weckert’s project page describes the work as turning a green street red and notes that the display could affect people’s route choices. The Guardian reported on the stunt, and Weckert’s project page describes the artwork.
Was the traffic jam real?
No matching physical traffic jam was created by the stunt. The reported setup was a person walking with phones in a cart; the jam was virtual, shown by Google Maps’ traffic display. German public broadcaster tagesschau.de also described it as a virtual jam and cautioned that the demonstration should not be taken to mean Maps could be fooled so simply in every situation. tagesschau.de’s report provides that qualification.
How does Google Maps know there is traffic?
Google’s September 3, 2020 explanation says aggregate location data from people navigating with Maps can help it understand road traffic. Product Manager Johann Lau also described the use of historical traffic patterns and machine-learning-based travel-time predictions developed with DeepMind. These are Google’s descriptions from 2020, not a complete or independently verified account of the system today. Google’s 2020 explanation of traffic prediction outlines those inputs and methods.
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Contemporary coverage also described traffic information as drawing on multiple sources, including aggregated, anonymized location data and contributions from the Maps community. That matters because Weckert’s artwork does not show that phone location is Google’s only traffic input, or that a phone must be actively navigating for every traffic signal to count. The available reporting does not establish the current details of Google Maps’ traffic system.
What the stunt does—and does not—show
- It shows: In this 2020 Berlin artwork, a slow-moving cluster of phones coincided with a congestion display in Google Maps.
- It does not establish: That 99 devices are a minimum or universal threshold, that the same method works now, or that a traffic display is based on phones alone.
- It is not a traffic-system test: No independent test or reproducibility finding is established by the cited accounts.
How widely was Google Maps used in 2020?
In its 2020 account, Google said people drove more than 1 billion kilometers with Maps per day across more than 220 countries and territories. Google also reported that its ETA predictions were consistently accurate for over 97% of trips. Those are company-reported figures, not independently verified results, and they provide context about the scale of the service rather than a measurement of Weckert’s stunt. Google’s post gives the figures and their context.
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