Mapmakers' sleight of hand / Cartographers put 'bunnies' on the map, tricking copycats, sometimes tourists

MAPTRAPSXXc-C-24JUL01-MT-RAD Photo by Katy Raddatz--The Chronicle Story about mapmaking, and map traps, aka bunnies--fake streets cartographers put on their wares to prevent plagarism. SHOWN: cartographers at California AAA. Dinah Russell converts a mechanical map of Santa Cruz to digital. less MAPTRAPSXXc-C-24JUL01-MT-RAD Photo by Katy Raddatz--The Chronicle Story about mapmaking, and map traps, aka bunnies--fake streets cartographers put on their wares to prevent plagarism. SHOWN: cartographers at ... more Photo: KATY RADDATZ Photo: KATY RADDATZ Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Mapmakers' sleight of hand / Cartographers put 'bunnies' on the map, tricking copycats, sometimes tourists 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Matt and Jane Walsh live at the corner of Geek and Lombard streets, a humorous address if Geek Street actually existed.

But Geek Street, which appears on the San Francisco transit map published by Carto Graphics, is a bogus boulevard created by a crafty cartographer to trick copycat competitors.

Bay Area maps are littered with similar sneaky touches, known among mapmakers as bunnies. Carto Graphics' map alone can direct the unwitting to such phony locales as Hedge Hog Court, M&M Street and Kaiser Street.

Geek Street is among the most famous bunnies because it is near Coit Tower and the curvy section of Lombard Street. Stories abound of tourists wandering around, maps and cameras in hand, searching for a landmark that isn't there.

"That's so funny," said Matt Walsh, whose apartment would face Geek Street if it were anything more than a small straight line on a big wrinkled map. "I've never even noticed that, and I've got this map."

Like most map bunnies, Geek Street has a story behind it.

"I had friends in college who were in a band called The Geeks," said Kristin Bergstrom, owner of Carto Graphics. "I thought it would be a good name for a bunny."

Bergstrom has named bunnies for friends, colleagues and a San Francisco State University professor who taught her a thing or two about maps.

"It's just my way of honoring people who have bent over backward to help me, " Bergstrom said.

Still other mapmakers, such as those at the California State Automobile Association, shun bunnies entirely and rely upon distinctive typography to fool copycats.

"To us, accuracy is more important," said Chuck Kurnow, manager of the association's cartography department.

Kurnow said the association hasn't used bunnies since the early 1970s, when a cartographer named Bill Westermeyer made a habit of including "Westermeyer Creek" on every map he made.

Map bunnies are named for an old newspaper puzzle that challenged readers to find rabbits in a drawing. They're also known by the less-colorful, but perhaps more accurate, term "map trap."

Scholars believe bunnies first appeared about a century ago, when new technology made it easier to mass-produce maps, increasing competition.

"Once there was more competition, there was an incentive for an operator to try to cut costs by simply plagiarizing someone else's map," said Mark Monmonier, a University of Syracuse geography professor.

So cartographers started dotting maps with bogus streets, landmarks and the occasional town to trap thieves. It worked until 1991, when the Supreme Court ruled in Feist vs. Rural Telephone Co. that collections of facts cannot be copyrighted.

Although the case stemmed from the plagiarism of a telephone book, Monmonier said the implication for mapmakers was clear.

"It means if you put traps on your map and someone else copies them, you might be able to call them names but you can't sue," he said.

Maps have been around almost as long as people have been trying to get from Point A to Point B without getting lost. Computers and high-tech gadgetry like global positioning satellites have made cartography more accurate, but mapmakers said their craft is as much art as science.

"There is a great deal of artistry and creativity," Kurnow said. "We invest a lot of time in this, and our hearts and souls go into it."

Kurnow supervises a team of 12 cartographers who create and revise 96 different maps published by the association.

Cartographers spend weeks sifting through government maps for data, which are fed into computers to provide the skeletons of their maps. A field cartographer roams the countryside, checking out suspect information.

Most maps are created on computers, but a few are painstakingly etched onto plastic sheets by hand with straight-edges and razor-sharp scribes -- a method that is becoming a thing of the past.

"We call it boring, tedious and monotonous," said Liz Clark, looking up from the Reno map she has spent weeks updating. "But we love it."

Kurnow's crew revises the maps every 18 months because even a place like San Francisco can see tremendous changes in that amount of time.

"It's a cartographer's nightmare when (the city) changes one block of Green Street to Beach Blanket Babylon Boulevard," Kurnow said. "Do you know how hard that is to fit on a map?"

Mindful that they might confuse tourists or drive FedEx crazy, cartographers usually hide their bunnies from such well-traveled areas as Fisherman's Wharf and the Financial District. They also tend to make them dead- end streets and rarely list them on the street index.

Others steer clear of making up streets and instead name things that haven't been named. Barclay Mapworks labeled Santa Cruz County earthquake fault lines "Not My Fault" and "All Your Fault."

"We also marked a surveyor's house with a turtle because he did some favors for us," said Dave Clausen, the company's chief executive. "It's just something you can do as a mapmaker."