This is What it’s Like to Roadtrip with Google Street View | Post 13 | New York

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Across the USA

5 min readAug 8, 2016

A road trip with Google Street View may seem a far cry from the real deal. One involves a monotony of mouse clicks; a lethargic sequence of flat images downloading in silence, one by stuttered one. The other delivers undulations of landscape, purr of engine, the grip of the road, wind, a truck’s rubber, oil, and brakes, and warmth radiating off a hot windshield.

But I submit that virtual road tripping very much generates felt experience, the same sensations as “brick and mortar” travel. My proof is New York State Route 12.

Nearly my entire journey from Utica to Norwich in central upstate New York followed Route 12. And when you click along during a virtual late November afternoon — as I did — you enjoy imagery-in-motion that takes you there and then. How so? For one, proper Street View Travel is motion. Google generates a blurred transition between Street View frames such that each click down the road pulls the new image into focus with a stretched zoom effect. Steady, tempo clicking results in a sense of moving along in long, measured strides. A silo comes into view, gets closer, and then passes.

On Route 12, many silos and fields came and went. Details were sharp, the imagery likely captured by Google’s latest cameras. When I revisit the screen grabs below, I wonder for a moment why I captured them. They’re nice, but weren’t they stunning at the time? (Don’t we wonder that with our real travel snapshots too?)

The hiccup is that they’ve been extracted from sequence, from the flow of travel. But for me, en route, they were seamless landscape. The car radio — iTunes — was on. I bent close to the screen in search of interesting details — firewood for sale down the road — and, as in real travel, I was immersed in an ambiance.

There’s something else too. Travel is about transport to a new place, and I am sitting in mid-summer Rwanda, not early winter northeast America. And so Street View stimulates more than senses, it stimulates memory of senses. And those are strong, and cascading. I see that auburn and yellow glow under the low grey clouds. But I also know it. So that dying light prompts in me the chill of coming-winter. So that brown ground feels hard. So the bark on those leafless trees are cold to my touch. I hear the wind bending that November corn field, scattering the leaves across those pumpkins. And the blur at the corner of each photo reminds me — convinces me — that I am on the move.

Another thing. Often, when I click along the same road for an extended period, it becomes clear that I am following in the precise footsteps of the driver of Google’s Street View car. My road trip may be virtual, but I am step-for-step, scene-for-scene replaying someone else’s real-life journey. And so I take on the details of his or her day; my mind wanders as his or hers must have. I seek and imagine someone else’s experience.

In Sherburne, did the driver laugh at the sign acclaiming D&D Diner’s feature meal?

What did he make of the fire-damaged house in East Pharsalia . . . and then the presence of volunteer fire department less than half a mile down the road?

Did she slow to a near-halt at the elephant figurines in Norwich?

I wondered at the beautiful landscape juxtaposing with rural poverty. Surely the Google driver did the same — or was possibly from the area?

And so for all the “real life” experience Street View lacks, it makes up for it with a genuine, immersive sensation of movement; by activating remembered senses; and by demanding one shares the observations of a fellow, earlier traveler.