Community Mapping Sweeping the Nation

I was reading the Los Angeles version of Streetsblog on my igoogle and came across this neat blog post about community mapping. Seems like its all the rage these days for cool projects like mapping foot and bike paths or the locations of different species of trees.

This is a subject near and dear to my heart: past posts have maps of the 60 worst intersections in Los Angeles, the 25 most ticketed/towed roads in Los Angeles, Los Angeles area colleges and universities, the Tour de Ballona, and Red Line Barhop. I also have a couple of public google maps of my summer vacation to Italy, a proposed itinerary for a 2009 Rust Belt baseball trip, proposed sites for NFL stadiums in Los Angeles, and the Boston Marathon Course (don't worry - I have no plans on running. ever).

The ability to create spatial representations is extremely powerful and, for me, an awful lot of fun. I can't wait until I have time to work on some REAL projects.

Striking Road Segment Map/Picture

I was on NotCot today and found this great map of the United States. It doesn't have any geographical or political features because the map only consists of roads. The really neat thing is how various features come out because of road density (like various large metropolitan areas, Lake Michigan, or the Appalachian Mountains). Neat-o!

The Brand New NYC Subway Line

I saw this awesome transit-related art today from a totally sweet design site, NotCot. I don't know if I really have anything to add except that I hope the WestSide subway doesn't end up causing too much douchebaggery.

Red Line Barhop

My friend Tannaz sent me a link to this Red Line Barhop from Thrillist. I've only been to 3 of these bars before (Gopher, Good Luck, and Pig & Whistle). So what better way to represent this than on a Google map? It's a bummer that MTA doesn't share all of its transportation info with Google yet but at least Google shows where the stations are. There area couple of strange choices, IMO, in regards to the station locations (especially around downtown). I haven't done a detailed analysis but the approximate walking distance would be like walking from LA to New York. That's not the point, though. The point is to see some cool bars, walk around a little bit, and use public transportation.



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Atlas of the Real World

No, not MTV's Real World. The Atlas of the Real World is a series of maps from WorldMapper that skews the areas of countries by such statistics as population, carbon emissions, and forest loss. Pretty interesting stuff.

(Image from WorldMapper)