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 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - If you went to Google, Yahoo, AOL or another mapping site to plot a route from San Francisco to Oakland in the hours after an oil tanker exploded, they would have sent you driving over a collapsed overpass engulfed in flames.
But within 48 hours of Sunday's accident, engineers at the major mapping sites had reprogrammed with alternate routes that added only a couple minutes to estimated drive times. That's a big improvement from a couple years ago, when routing algorithms were only updated sporadically.
Digital cartographers say the response to the Oakland disaster was a promising sign of what's to come — up-to-the-minute detours and routing technology that takes into account not only major disasters but fender benders and traffic jams.
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