If you are Austrian and listened to the Ö3 radio station within the last 25 years, chances are you heard some report on the radio traffic service about the A23 autobahn and the “closed exit Simmering”.
The A23 is a Vienna city autobahn and sees some of the worst traffic in Austria. It’s notorious for frequent traffic jams and accidents. Some decades ago it was planned to connect this expressway to the A3 autobahn, and the junction would have been at the Arsenal area in Simmering.
Ramps for this junction had already been constructed when the project – being way over budget and always under fire from citizen protests – was canceled. Over the following years several attempts were made to use the ramps as intended, but none made it past the budgeting phase, so they were repurposed as mere maintenance exits - closed for general traffic (hence the name “closed exit Simmering”), but large and visible enough to become a landmark to approximate the location of an accident or the length of a traffic jam via radio traffic service. In 2021 it was finally decided to scrap the ramps completely.
Today we decided to visit the Böhmischer Prater. Coming from the 18th distinct that means crossing Vienna to the 10th district, and as usual, when we are rather unfamiliar with a part of town, we relied on our mobile navigation apps to guide us there.
Usually that would be Google Maps, but since Apple recently released a very welcome update of the Austrian maps in its own Maps app, we thought we’d give Apple Maps a try.
Turn-by-turn navigation surprised us with some nice features like using “human” instructions (“turn left at the next traffic lights”) instead of announcing an upcoming turn “in 400 meters”.
A rather not so nice surprise was when we noticed that Apple Maps had routed us off the A23 at the - you guessed it - closed exit Simmering.
It’s a mystery how Apple decided to put a road there, because there is none, and there are no traffic signs that could have been picked up or misinterpreted by the cameras on their mapping vehicles.
Luckily we decided not to follow these instructions and thus didn’t fall off the autobahn, and after a detour of a couple of minutes we arrived at the Böhmischer Prater.
I’ve send an error report through the Maps app (“there is no exit”), let’s see how long it takes them to fix it.