Estimating What It Costs to Re-capture Google Maps Street View for New York

Imagine that one day every Street View image Google Maps holds for New York is lost. As the product manager, estimate what it would cost to rebuild that coverage. Lay out your approach, label each assumption, do the arithmetic, and finish with a number and a check on whether it is reasonable. ```hint Split the bill Separate the costs that grow with the amount of street to cover from the fixed cost of running the effort. For the first group, the key unknown is how much ground a capture team can cover per day on crowded streets. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does "New York" mean the five boroughs of the city or the whole state? - Is everything gone, including backups and the archive of older imagery, or only the currently published panoramas? - Can capture vehicles and camera equipment already operating elsewhere be reassigned, or must new hardware be bought? - Does the rebuild need to match the earlier coverage, including park paths and pedestrian areas, or only the public road network? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Scope fixed before any arithmetic: city versus state, roads versus pedestrian areas, and whether any copy survives. - A cost equation that separates capture, image processing, privacy review and program overhead, with every input labeled as an assumption. - Realistic capture rates for dense city streets (speed, daylight and weather, repeat passes) and correct arithmetic. - A sanity check of the total from a second angle, such as cost per street mile or the size of the team involved. - What money cannot fix, such as lost historical imagery, plus how to order the re-capture and prevent a repeat. ### Follow-up Questions - Leadership wants the city back online in two weeks instead of a couple of months. How do the cost and the plan change? - Which single assumption is your estimate most sensitive to, and how would you check it quickly? - How would you put a value on the historical imagery that can never be captured again?