This morning I cruised through the streets of a scenic Maine town while classic country music played on the radio. Several of the 900 people in the backseat of the car on the day I hopped in counted pride flags as we passed them. Every time we came across an intersection, several of them would reach up and try to jerk the wheel onto a new road.
This is the Internet Roadtrip, a pleasant cruising journey across America one Google Street View screenshot at a time. Anyone on the website is also on the road trip and can vote on where the car will go, what radio station to listen to, and whether or not to honk the horn. The site counts votes at every new section of Street View and makes a decision about where to take the car every nine seconds. Then, it moves a few feet forward.
It’s a road trip made entirely of backseat drivers, all jockeying to spin the wheel. A steering wheel at the bottom of the screen shifts from left to right as the votes come in, indicating the direction the car will take. A window in the upper right tallies the votes as they come in. Another window tells you the exact address of the car. The radio stations are pulled from internet streams near the car’s location.
The Internet Roadtrip began last Tuesday in Boston and is, as of this writing, tooling around Ogunquit, Maine. Developer Neal Agarwal told 404 Media he was inspired by Twitch Plays Pokémon and Reddit’s /r/Place. “I think communal experiences on the internet are so fun, especially when there’s some shared goal,” he said. “I’ve had the idea of ‘Twitch plays self-driving car’ for a long time, but that’s probably not street legal so this is the next best thing.”
There’s a Discord server for the Internet Roadtrip where everyone tugging on the wheel can gather to discuss where to take the car. The chat from one of the server’s channels runs along the side of the website. It makes it feel like the entire server is in the car with you, all of them yelling from the backseat.
“If we go off track I swear I’ll explode into plastic fishes,” says one user.
“Lef left left,” another person says at an intersection.
“HIT THEM,” another user says as some pedestrians appear on a nearby sidewalk.
A round of users start spamming “honk” in chat, trying to get people to vote for it. The sound of a honk fills my headphones. They won.
“YES WE HONKED,” one of the users says.
This isn’t a convenient way to travel. Tallying votes every few few feet slows down the trip and the car is only going about 3 MPH. “So it’ll take a while to cross the country,” Agarwal said.
A big moment happened for the drivers a few days ago when it got a shoutout from WMUAx 91.1 FM, a college radio station out of Amherst, Massachusetts while it was driving through the state. Someone from the Discord server called into the station, got on the air, and shared the project with the DJs. “This is so cool,” one of the DJs said on air.
In the bottom left corner of the screen a map that shows the car’s current location. As it moves across the country, it paints a red line to show where it’s been. The drivers lit out from Boston last week and cruised down to Providence before cutting west and heading north to Maine. “People wanted to go to Woonsocket because it had a funny name. And then we were arguing about whether to go to New York City or to go to Maine. And Maine won out,” the driver who called the radio station explained.
In the Discord server, users are arguing about where to drive and attempting to find a route that will take them across the U.S. border into Canada via Street View. “It’s also really cool seeing the different route plans people are making,” Agarwal said. “Hitting all 50 states also seems to be a common goal. I like how people are interpreting the shapes on the map and someone also recorded a 30 hour timelapse.”
Back in Maine, repulsed users changed the station off of classic country when Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine” hit the airwaves. Users hit seek until it spun back around to a Maine-area college station, WBOR 91.1, where David Bowie “Life on Mars.”“Get back on the highway to Canada,” says one user.“It’s Canada time,” says another, as the car navigates a tidy neighborhood in Maine.
Someone asks how long until the car gets to Portland, Maine. “4 or 5 hours i think, we keep making a lot of detours though,” someone says.
Another person in the backseat says, at this pace, it’ll take the car a week to get to Canada.
