With its chain restaurants and car lots, Stuarts Draft Highway may not be the most scenic drive in the Shenandoah Valley, but the road now is one of only a handful in Augusta County that has been photographed in driver-eye-view for Google Maps.
Google Maps and other Web sites long have helped drivers get where they want to go, but Google Street View offers something different: the ability to see 360-degree panoramic photographs of chosen streets. Instead of the bird’s eye view, site users can click on streets and look around as through they are on the sidewalk.
Until recently, the service was available almost exclusively in big cities, where users would see what apartments and restaurants looked like before driving to them. But Google this month doubled its coverage.
In addition to Stuarts Draft Highway, users can now see the Blue Ridge Parkway, interstates 64 and 81 and a portion of Greenville Road south of Staunton.
“Before it had been a handful of major metropolitan areas,” said Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo, who hails from Northern Virginia. “We’d been getting a lot of response ... It’s safe to say we’re continuing to bring it to new areas across the country.”
That means a Google driver with a special 360-degree camera must have driven the included streets sometime in recent months. Those images were then loaded onto the map.
Newly included streets in the valley show views from the Parkway, for example, but also the shuttered and aging buildings where it begins near I-64 on Afton Mountain. Photos from Stuarts Draft Highway include dozens of vehicles that happened to be driving near the Google camera car, including a motorcyclist.
Although Street View raised some privacy concerns about pedestrians and license plates included online, a quick “ride” down Stuarts Draft Highway shows few (if any) locals were out on the gray day the camera car rolled through town.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Results Loading...