Incident Record: Address Pin Confusion
The pin is on the right block. The entrance is on a different street. This information was not in the pin.
Incident Record: Address Pin Navigation Failure, November 2022 Observed at: The Wrong Side of a Building
Incident Description
The subject navigated to a shared location using a map application pin. The pin was dropped by another party and shared via a messaging application. The pin appeared to indicate the correct location. Navigation proceeded normally. The subject arrived at the indicated coordinates.
The entrance was on the other side of the building.
Circumstances
The building occupies half a block. Its street address corresponds to the avenue that runs along its south face. Its entrance is on the cross street along its east face. The pin was placed at the address-coordinate, which is the south face. The entrance is not on the south face.
The subject stood on the south face for ninety seconds before determining that no entrance was present on the south face. The subject then walked around the building. The entrance was located. The subject was four minutes late.
The Pin Problem
The pin marks the location of the building as a geographic object, not the location of the building as a navigable destination. A building can be found and not entered from the same coordinate. In cities with buildings that occupy multiple street faces, this is not an edge case.
Arrival at the pin is not arrival at the destination. It is arrival at a coordinate that approximates the destination with a precision that is sufficient for most buildings and insufficient for buildings with entrance conditions that differ from address conditions.
The Information Gap
The person who dropped the pin knows where the entrance is. They navigate to this building regularly. The pin represents their knowledge of where the building is located on a map, not their knowledge of where the building is accessed by foot. These are different pieces of information stored in different cognitive systems, and only one of them was transmitted.
The subject did not ask about the entrance. This was a reasonable omission for a piece of information that pins are assumed to convey.
The Governing Rule
Map pins communicate addresses. Addresses are administrative identifiers that correspond to geographic coordinates derived from street frontage conventions. The pin is correct by this standard. The pin is also, in practice, a one-sided representation of a three-dimensional object with multiple accessible faces.
The building is where the pin says it is. The entrance is elsewhere. Both are accurate.
Consequence
Eventually address pin confusion acquires an unwritten enforcement system that everyone denies creating. The subject now messages ahead when navigating to unfamiliar buildings: "which entrance." Three out of five times, the response reveals that the entrance is not where the pin suggests. The other two times, the sender is surprised by the question.
Incident Status
Resolved. Arrival achieved. Record filed for future navigation planning.