Saturday, June 16, 2018

Round and round it goes. When it stops nobody knows.



I haven't been out to Vallejo in a couple of years. But this area of Benecia always catches my eye because it used to house the Mothball Fleet. The used to have maybe 50 ships there, but they have all finally (but a couple) have been removed which I guess is good. Some people would try to sneak on the ships and take pictures at night. Which I always thought was pretty cool.

Back when I first started my career I dated a small plane pilot and he flew me over the top of the ships and I still have the pictures of when the ships were all there. It was kinda neat in a way. A ghost ship memorial. But they were leaching stuff into the Bay so they had to go.

Anyway...this area ~is~ right next to rail tracks, but they are storing a ton of cars there. Back during the recession I used to make it up this way pretty often, and even back then I never saw this kind of car build up in this spot. But they have been storing them there for so long they are showing up on satellite. So take this for what you will. But the peculiar thing was they were starting to park them up in the oil tank storage area as you can see on this google sat map. You have to pan to the left to see the tanks. Sat doesn't pick up the cars being stored up that high.

I was going to try and do some follow up shots on the way home but decided to go to San Jose instead. I swear I could do a whole day just doing a rescan of my ghost lots. But this is starting to get super 2007 crazy. My local Toyota dealership is double parking cars now. Just a week ago they were emailing me trying to get rid of 2017 models! It's JUNE 2018.

This whole carpocolypse is way far from over. I think a bunch of people are going to go bankrupt. Which is fine by Silicon Valley because they don't think there is going to be car dealers in the future. All these new car start ups are doing direct to buyers. So there's that.

But just look at any car lot these days. They have a massive amount of cars on them.

3 comments:

  1. I think things like Google Maps are increasing the frequency that they're updating the satellite images on maps. I've noticed it looking at the images of our property.

    Last year (late winter/early spring) we had a HUGE pine tree come down, not 6 months later I realized you could see the piles of cut up tree on Google Maps. And it had only been a year earlier that I had noticed that they'd put up updated images (noticeable by the progress on a couple around the house projects).

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  2. Capital of Texas RefugeeSunday, June 17, 2018 10:35:00 AM

    Google Maps is also increasing the frequency of how often they mess up working with older browsers that aren't that much older ...

    C'mon, Firefox 49 for Fedora/RHEL isn't that old, Google.

    So I can't look at your Google Maps link today.

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  3. It interesting you say that Ruth. I'd gotten used to it being years before stuff showed up. And I want to be fair when I run into these lots. Maybe I'm missing something. But it sure looks crazy to me.

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