Category Archives: Cartography

DC Photo Map

A couple of blogs today (GGW, DCist) featured this fantastic map of DC and environs from Flickr user Eric Fischer.

Fischer has a set of similar maps from various cities around the world. Fischer’s methodology takes data from the images and the user accounts to determine the location of the photo (via geotagging), as well as the time and date and the type of user (tourist, local, or unknown). Tourist photos are in red, locals in blue, and unknown data in yellow. Each dot represents a photo. Photos taken in succession by the same user within 10 minutes of each other are connected by a line.

Fischer also has maps of cities that do not discern between tourists and locals.

More Oil Maps

The New York Times continues to update their oil spill map, mentioned before here.

The comparison in the legend to the volume of oil from the Exxon Valdez is the scary part.

NYT Infographics – VMT and Oil

Two great infographics from the New York Times – both related to petroleum.

First, a great graph of per capita VMT compared to changes in gas prices:

Putting vehicle miles traveled per capita along the x-axis instead of time makes the swings in both price and VMT more obvious. The massive growth of VMT over time despite the swings in prices shows just how entrenched car culture and automobility are in the US.

All that VMT must need a lot of oil. The Times also has a handy map of the Coast Guard’s forecasts for the extent of the growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

April 22:

April 28:

May 1:

May 4:

Parking, Census, & Maps

Some cool map-related items:

San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city. The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which are on-street spaces – occupying an area comparable to the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The release of the public parking space census coincides with the redesign of the website for SFPark, an occupancy-based parking management trial funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant, which among many objectives, seeks to manage the supply of parking by adjusting the cost to match demand. To put that in laymen’s terms, if SFPark works well, there should be enough parking at the curb so that drivers don’t have to circle the block endlessly searching for that elusive space. By gradually adjusting the price of parking up or down in the pilot areas, the city expects to create roughly one or two free spaces per block face at any time, the original purpose of parking meters when they were introduced in the 1930s.

Jay Primus, who directs the SFPark trial for the MTA, said the parking census was the first step toward a better understanding of how parking works in San Francisco, filling a void where city planners could only make rough estimates previously. “If you can’t manage what you can’t count, doing a careful survey and documenting all publicly available parking was a critical first step for the MTA for how we manage parking more intelligently,” he said.

The importance of this data, especially to this level of detail, cannot be understated. Applying this type of information to performance pricing systems is just one potential application. The study’s accompanying PDF map shows just how detailed and granular the data is:

Each dot along the streets represents a meter, the larger circles within blocks represent off-street parking. Garages and non-metered street spaces with less than 25 spaces per block aren’t even shown.

The real Census also has some cool maps – the Census Bureau’s Take 10 map allows you to see real time (relatively speaking) response rates by census tract for DC:

Currently, DC’s response rate stands at 44%. Tract 4902, highlighted above, is only at 39%.

Bar Crawl

Two things I like – beer and maps. Maps about booze are even better.

Having grown up in the Midwest – born and raised in Minnesota, with lots of family in Wisconsin, as well as living in Madison and Ann Arbor, it’s no surprise to me that people there like to drink. It’s a part of the culture. Now, we have some maps to prove it.

The blog floating sheep has some great maps of America’s beer belt. First, the total number of bars in various locations across the US, based on Google maps’ directory.

Next, a point of reference – a map showing the relative popularity of bars to grocery stores – red indicates more bars than grocery stores:

Finally, putting Wisconsin’s culture on display, a map of how many Google Maps entries there are for bars, normalizing the data to show the relative popularity of them.

Unsurprisingly, we see all sorts of concentrations of bars that correlate with population density – namely, cities. Wisconsin, however, is punching well above its weight. That well-worn drinking culture shines through. Southern cities, conversely, seem a little thing based on their populations – perhaps a holdover from dry counties and other temperance movements?

Either way, it’s a cool set of maps.

Historic DC Maps

In the same vein as UCLA’s Hypercities maps I’ve discussed previously, I recently ran across some more historical maps from Shannon over at We Love DC. The maps themselves are ok, not nearly as detailed or interesting as the Hypercities maps, taking the historic maps and re-projecting them onto an interactive Google maps interface.

More interesting to me, however, is an older post of Shannon’s that directs you to David Rumsey’s historical map archive, as well as a world-wide index – which includes (unlike the Hypercities site) two DC maps – from 1851 and 1861.

The index page shows you the wide variety of locations covered:

The interface is similar to the hypercities one, allowing you to toggle on a historical map that has been manipulated to match the projection of the underlying Google interface. This allows you to navigate around the environment.

First, the base layer, a current aerial of DC:

Here’s the 1851 map of DC:

And the 1861 map:

You can adjust the opacity to directly compare the current conditions to the map – some interesting details concern the shoreline of the Anacostia, the existence of Hains Point, as well as the evolution of the city’s built environment:

The detail in the 1861 map is fantastic. Extremely detailed, right down to the figure ground of individual buildings – as well as demonstrating how much of L’Enfant’s plan had been built out on the eve of the Civil War.

On the edges of the L’Enfant city, the map shows how historic roads have shaped the current city, such as Columbia Road meeting Connecticut:

Also, the property boundaries outside of the L’Enfant plan influenced the street patterns of later developments. Note how the slightly off-kilter grid of LeDroit Park corresponds to the landholdings of one C. Miller:

Very cool stuff.

Fun with maps

Something you can do to waste time during the snow day – UCLA has a great website with a series of historical maps scaled and overlaid on a contemporary aerial image for select cities around the world. The closest to DC is New York, but this is still a lot of fun to play around with.

Hat tip to Dale for the link.

Some screenshots to give you an example of the interface and how it works:

The Hypercities interface. Note the base aerial photo, various maps to toggle in the right sidebar, other available cities in the upper right map, and the usual Google map interface navigation.

New York, base aerial photo.

New York, with 1766 map overlay

1766 map, with opacity adjusted.

Same as above, with a 1775 map of Lower Manhattan overlay.

There are tons of historical maps and an incredible amount of detail to explore here. I’ve been playing around with it and feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Very cool stuff.

Again, the URL is hypercities.ats.ucla.edu. Check it out.

Spiky Maps

A great visual from last week over at Urban Catrography – New York’s daytime and nighttime population:

Larger version available here.

Not only can you see the obvious employment centers in downtown and midtown Manhattan, but also note the small daytime population along the various waterfronts and dock areas that have no population at night – reminding us that the port functions soldier on.

City Block

a work in progress…