The Day Google Maps Believed a Lie

A story, quote, and lesson about being “good enough”

Perfection is a slippery slope.

Almost three years after a strange moment at a demonstration in Berlin, artist Simon Weckert couldn’t shake what he’d seen: Google Maps showed a massive traffic jam on a street with no cars.

The road was empty, but the map was red.

Then it clicked. It wasn’t cars that had triggered the “slow traffic” warning. It was people, and more specifically, the smartphones in their pockets. A crowd with enough location signals can look a lot like gridlock.

So Weckert wondered: what if you removed the crowd and kept the signals?

He borrowed phones from friends and rental companies until he had 99 devices. He stacked them into a small red wagon. Then he walked. Up and down a street in Berlin, for hours, dragging a cart full of glowing screens like some modern-day street performer.

It didn’t work instantly. Google Maps took about an hour to catch up. But eventually, a long red line appeared on the screen, as if traffic had slowed to a crawl. Drivers nearby could be rerouted, not because there was a real jam, but because an artist had created a convincing illusion of one.

It’s tempting to view this as a clever prank, but Weckert framed it differently. For him, the simplicity was the point. He wasn’t trying to write sophisticated code or break into a system. He was trying to show how much we trust the systems around us, and how easily those systems can shape reality once we believe them.

Google, for its part, acknowledged how Maps traffic works: the product continuously refreshes traffic data using aggregated, anonymized location information from people who have location services turned on, along with other community inputs. And they even appreciated the creativity because it helps them make Maps better over time.

In other words, the core design worked brilliantly for the overwhelming majority of people. It used a signal that already existed at global scale: the fact that millions of devices move through streets every day. It didn’t need perfect information. It needed enough.

“I don’t need the people. I just need their smartphones.”

- Simon Weckert

There’s a tension in almost every project: do you ship something useful now, or wait until you’ve anticipated every possible risk or scenario?

Google’s engineers made Maps better for the vast majority of people by using a simple, scalable truth: millions of phones moving through streets can reveal traffic without needing perfect information. Could someone exploit that with 99 phones in a wagon? Sure. But how common is that in real life?

If you only build for the weirdest edge case, you often sacrifice the everyday value you could deliver to everyone else.

Some fields demand maximum scrutiny: health, security, research, anything where failure causes irreversible harm. But for most work, “good enough” is not a weakness. It is the doorway to learning, iteration, and progress.

So now I ask you:

What are you delaying right now because you want it flawless, when a thoughtful first version would get you moving?

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