How fast is Google Street view?

What I mean by this is, when you allow the imagary to scroll, how long does it take to get from A to B? And if that A to B is a known distance, if I were to translate it into the real world, how fast would the camera car be travelling?

I get the feeling that this may be a way of callibrating how fast mt PC is, rather than how fast Street View is, but let's see what happens anyway...

Here's how it works.

1) Take a measured bit of road. (using the Google Earth line function thing is fine. I don't need to go out with a pedometer or ball of wool)

2) Travel along that bit of road in Street View, and time how long it takes to cover the measured section

3) Do a bit of simple arithmetic.

Well first of all, here's my road.

The Lever Causeway. Basically, a mile long tree lined straight. There have been some horrendous accidents there over the years.

From the beginning of the red rumble strip marking the beginning of a 30 mph zone on the right of the picture to where the centre line of the road on the south side interescts the causeway is exactly one quarter of a mile. This would take exactly 15 seconds to do at a speed of 60 miles per hour.

Here#s how the trip looks, on Street view:

as you can see, it takes one minute and eight seconds to cover that quarter of a mile.

So it would take 4 minutes and 32 seconds to do a mile. Let's call it 4 minutes 30.

9 minutes would cover 2 miles. So 90 minutes would cover 20 miles. 90 minutes is one and a half hours, so divide 20 by 3 and multiply by 2 to get the answer...

Google Street View, running through Google Earth, when viewed on my (dual core processor, dedicated graphics card) computer, runs at a speed of about 15 miles per hour.