Mapper's delight

“Hackney’s,” Ryan Gracia mutters from behind the wheel as he turns right onto Dearborn Street from Polk Street. His partner, Richard Joyce, squints at the tiny type on a GPS the size of a computer screen that’s affixed to the dash between them:

“Got that,” he replies from the passenger side.

“Flaco’s Tacos,” Gracia says as he spots the Mexican restaurant.

“What tacos?” Joyce asks, peering out the window.

“Flaco—it means skinny.”

Joyce scrutinizes the monitor but doesn’t see Flaco’s. “Okay, let’s pull over,” he tells Gracia.

We’re cruising the South Loop in a Ford Escape hybrid equipped with six cameras whose range covers 270 degrees. Each cam captures three photographs per second in order to verify that every last bit of the mass of information—the number of lanes on the street, the type of marking dividing the lanes, the speed limit, the name and address of “points of interest” like restaurants and stores—that populates the monitor matches what’s on the street.

Gracia, 24, and Joyce, 31, are geographic analysts (or “GAs”) for NAVTEQ, a Chicago-based company that provides digital map information to car manufacturers’ GPS navigation systems and to websites like MapQuest. NAVTEQ was Google Maps’ supplier until December 2008, when Google began using NAVTEQ competitor Tele Atlas. Street teams like Joyce and Gracia traverse the city in technologically tricked-out cars collecting data from unmarked territory (like far-flung new subdivisions), and adjusting information as roads change (like the lane expansion on I-294). They also stroll through parks and buildings (like City Hall) to document shortcuts and pedestrian paths for walking directions, and respond to user comments about incorrect addresses or other flukes in the constantly changing map data—like, say, the absence of Flaco’s Dearborn location, which opened a few months ago.

As Joyce jots down the name of the restaurant on the digital tablet on his lap, his scrawls appear superimposed on the mess of circles, rectangles and multicolored lines that make up the detailed map displayed on the screen. When the partners get back to their West Loop office in the Boeing building, they’ll comb through the photographs and markings they’ve made and update NAVTEQ’s database—a time-consuming process that usually takes them about twice as long as they spend driving. But for now, we’re still pulled over on Dearborn, identifying every single thing in sight. “We’ve got a Potbelly on the left,” Gracia begins, in what’s beginning to seem like a never-ending enterprise. The two map geeks, however, appear indefatigable: “It’s not like our job is ever done,” Joyce explains, oddly cheerful as he verifies that, yes, this location of the ubiquitous sandwich shop appears properly in the database. One restaurant down, mere thousands left to go.