I've always wondered if Google could partner with the US Postal Service and piggyback off their fleet for continuous streetview updates. Those mail trucks already drive the 99% of roads (that are not highways) every day and the maps would get updated more often. To save money, they also wouldn't have to attach cameras to every truck. Just move them from vehicle to vehicle on a rotational basis to eventually cover 100% of the routes.
Heck, Google Inc probably wouldn't even have to pay all of the costs. They could make a convincing case to the Federal government that upgrading the USPS mail trucks with cameras would give law enforcement and civil planners up-to-date geographic data. Therefore, they'd get a multi-billion government grant to implement it.
Or, they could also partner with Uber/Lyft. It just seems like the USPS (or FedEx/UPS) fleet has more consistent vehicle dimensions for attaching a multi-camera rig.
I think if the USPO was capturing this data, then it should be available to everyone.
It wouldn't be a "gift" from the USPS. It would be a mutually beneficial financial contract. (E.g. 5 year multi-million dollar contract to mount Google cameras.)
Similar to how private events pay the government for extra police officers to direct traffic or supplement security. Or how the Pentagon charged the Top Gun film production $25,000 to turn an aircraft carrier around.[1] Government entities have set the precedent that they will sell services to private companies.
The citizens' access to the USPS photos would a given and be part of the contract.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-it-cost-25-000-to-turn-the-shi...
So there is precedent for a private company paying a pseudo-USG entity for private benefit.
If not that reason, the government could come up with other justifications. (The US government is very good at coming up with justifications for anything.)
In any case, getting some extra revenue from trucks already burning up huge amounts of fossil fuel to deliver mail seems like an eco-green win/win.
[1] https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2016/pr16_092....
The postal service owns tons of valuable land and also could easily charge amazon, etc. competitive rates when abused for their last mile services.
I'd rather my postal service not be treated like another shitty wall street commodity. We all benefit from its continued existence, warts and all.
Please see https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2017/pr17_007....
Summary:
- operation cost reduced
- holiday sales saw growth
- first-class mail saw continued loss
It is known USPS has been losing money for many years now due to the raise of emails and now social media and instant messaging.
This is a strong reason some people proposed to privatize USPS instead.
Oh, I wasn't thinking that every street every day would get recorded. I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos. (I haven't done a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so maybe I'm wrong and they actually can).
I was just thinking that there are many streetviews (especially rural areas) in Google Maps captured in 2007. My street is from 2013. Using another entity's expansive fleet of vehicles, those maps could be updated more frequently... like once a month instead of every 4 to 10 years. Also, the USPS trucks are already burning the gas driving all those roads so it's a waste of fuel to have another car drive the same route just for photos.
As for fears of surveillance, it's going to depend on:
(1) if the citizens feel they also get benefit from the updated data. E.g. web surfers on Zillow see a house for sale and they would prefer to see a streetview of the neighborhood from last month instead of 5 years ago. Same for scoping out a company's address for a job interview.
(2) Are USPS cameras perceived as a minor extension of traffic cameras at every extension that citizens drive through every day and the police car dash cams that record a continuous loop as they patrol the city? Or it's a major step change in data collection that the public would reject. I don't know.
If you keep taking pictures of the same things over and over, you get a really high compression ratio. Not to mention that you have the option to throw out the old data.
Don't forget that the cameras on the cars would not need to have 30 fps uploaded at 4k resolution.
Assumptions...
4,000,000 miles of roads
(4.12 million minus 164,000)[1][2]
5280 ft per mile
200 ft as guess of distance between snapshots
60,000 bytes as estimate for 1 jpg sized for "near HD"[3]
15 photos per set [3]
So, 95 TB is within the realm of possiblity but it seems like coordinating the logistics in the USA to upload that much from trucks every day would be a huge hurdle. (The Youtube 24TB is worldwide uploads and not just USA.) Since the vast majority of the streetview images for a particular day won't be requested by anyone, it wouldn't be a good return-on-investment to pay for that much disk space.
Obviously, the total goes up if I underestimated the intervals (100 ft instead of 200 ft) or underestimated the jpg size (new generation of HD cameras output 200000 bytes for still images). The total goes down if a significant chunk of those 4 million miles don't need streetviews. There are probably other factors I'm missing. (What's that famous Google interview question again? "How many gas stations are there in the USA?"[7])
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=miles+of+roads+in+usa
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+miles+of+highways+i...
[3] https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-fleet-...
[4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((4*10%5E6)*5280%2F200...
[5] https://www.quora.com/How-many-terabytes-of-storage-does-You...
[6] https://petapixel.com/2012/06/06/google-street-view-has-snap...
[7] https://www.google.com/search?q=interview+question+how+many+...
As to the logistics of data transfer - why not move the data physically? You're already carrying it around in all the mail trucks. Most of the logistics are already taken care of by the existing postal infrastructure. Just take the SD card out at the depo and put it on the next mail vehicle going towards Google.
Or, to paraphrase Andy Tanenbaum, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a postal truck with a shoebox of microSD cards hurtling down the highway".
*Fun fact - a shoebox full of 128 gigabyte microSDs has a capacity of nearly 9 petabytes!
ie: a county could pay for its counties streets to save man hours for sqft appraisals, with just change detection, for the annual property appraisal updates.
There is also Mapillary, which is also part of the OSM ecosystem and is very similar to OSC.