This past Sunday saw a strange sight, even by Market Street standards, when a laser-equipped motorcade made its sluggish way down Market Street. But perhaps you missed the LiDAR truck, which needed the escort to keep it from stopping as it took a slow crawl to begin its 3D map survey, a sample of which is above. That's because it was out from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., you know, when you couldn't get in its way.

The idea is for SF Public Works and the SFMTA to create a high-tech, highly exacting map —  the kind usually reserved for topographical surveys — of the central thoroughfare as it stands today. It's good to have as a resource for city planning, and specifically, the project is being conducted with the Better Market Street project in mind. The map will allow the Better Market Street team "to move from conceptual to detailed designs and then on to construction to improve San Francisco’s premier corridor." That might be the first time Market's been called that in quite some time.

But for the would-be parade there was one big problem Sunday, which Wired points out. It rained.

That threw off the LiDAR truck, but the plan is to have back out. It was going to take another pass, anyway, since as wired writes, "accuracy also goes up with repeated scans, so the truck will take four trips on a mostly-unpopulated street."

Previously: You May Soon Be Forbidden From Driving On Most Of Market Street