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I'm pretty sure this little accident happened as a result of a trap street near where I used to live:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-22158829

The 'trap' was that on google maps it was made to look like a regular street when it clearly wasn't.

I've found many errors in Google maps over the years. I'm not convinced any of them are traps, they are just the result of not actually surveying the areas they claim to map.

Or the data is just old. Years ago, the junction between Route 1 and Route 36 in Iceland was very visibly wrong on Google Maps. If you pulled over and looked over the bushes, about a quarter mile south of the intersection, you could see the old Route 36 that was still in Google's road network, with crumbling asphalt and all. And if you looked at satellite imagery, of course there was no trace yet of the newer and more efficient fork.

Digital cartography is hard. Even without various intentional errors and distortions (many maps contain intentional dimensional non-linearities for "strategic reasons", ie. so that they cannot be directly used for directing artilery fire) the input data is full of various unintentional noise and non-sense because of the processes that were used in acquiring and digitizing that data in the first place. Processes ranging from digitizing paper maps of generally unknown accuracy with digitizer to just guessing positions of things from sharpie marks on hand-drawn map created by who knows who in the field. Trying to make some sense of such data was my first real IT job.

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