Bing Maps vs Google Maps - Both could use toll cost information

I use Google Maps weekly. It's a great product. But one thing that lately has bothered me about Maps is that there should be toll cost information as part of the package. They've given us Street View, traffic conditions, alternative routes and they tell us about sections of roads that have tolls. Why not give the toll costs as well? I need this information for several reasons but sending in reimbursable receipts is one I think many could related to.  I tried Bing Maps to see if this was an improvement. Not at all. See the figures and red circles. In the past I've tried Bing Maps and the only thing that I found "different" was they gave us a Bird's-eye view option which I find annoying. And, unfortunately Google Maps adopted that feature when you zoom in closely. 

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Hurricane Sandy Flood Damage Maps from New York Times

I've been admiring the great work that the New York Times has been doing by not only telling about but showing through map visualizations the extent of damage brought on by Hurricane Sandy. The maps above and below are from Surveying the Destruction Caused by Hurricane Sandy.

When you click on a rectangle on the Flooding in NYC map, you'll get something like above from Brighton Beach NY which shows building footprints colored with the height of the water surge and photos of damages. These maps went live in mid- ot late-November and didn't include damage from New Jersey.

But now you can click on Regional Damage and you have the map above which gives some insight into the extent of damage across NJ and NY. And then below is a zoomed-in look at Long Branch/Monmouth Beach, NJ, showing destroyed and damaged structures and photos of the area.

As always, impressive work and effort by the cartographers of the Times. Here is the most recent article On Ravaged Coastline, It's Rebuild Deliberately vs. Rebuild Now. There was a slick graphic that accompanied the paper article but it seems to not yet be uploaded on to the Times online website.

 

Twitter and Maps

I like Twitter. And I like maps. Here at The One Two Million Tweet Map the two are mashed up. Pretty cool. 

Try showing tweets by a topic or a hastag. One map shows the tweets that use the word "football" in them, as they're happening, around the world. The other shows all tweets as a heat map.

I heard about the site at The Clever Sheep.

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Flood Map and Flood Zones in New York and New Jersey

I saw this nice and clean map of New York and New Jersey shoreline inundated by Hurricane Sandy - Flooding v. Flood Zones - out of WNYC.

From the site: How Sandy flooded the New York & New Jersey coastlines, compared to storm-surge predictions by hurricane size. Sandy approached as a Category 1.

Mapping options include Actual Flooding and Predicted Surge Zones. The map with the blue regions (above) is zoomed in on Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey. All this blue was once swampy and marshy and probably deemed useless by early industrialists so it was filled in to make ports and housing.

The map was created with MapBox and OpenStreetMap. Thanks for the retweet, TheSteve0.

Using Maps to Teach U.S History - Manifest Destiny

Check out Manifest Destiny. This is a great way to visualize and teach about the expansion of the United States through time. Plus the site is very slick and easy to use.

From the web site: Manifest Destiny tells the story of the United States in 141 maps from the Declaration of Independence to the present.

Hover over the Legend and the legend shows up (see above).

Hover over a thumbnail of a map and see the date (below).

Click on a map and get more information. You can also highlight the changes on the map (below)

Great work by data visualization consultant, Michael Porath. Thank you, Aprecido Leite, for the tweet.

Conflict Mapping Through Time

This is a useful web map showing conflicts through the ages - Conflict History. Built in Google Maps, the site loads somewhat slowly, but is filled with useful battle information culled from and linking to Wikipedia. Could be useful for some middle schoolers and such.

Thanks for the link Diana!

Toilet Access: Mapping the Facilities in a Mumbai Slum

Access to a toilet is something we can all understand. When I'm walking around an unfamiliar city and I or one of my children need to use a restroom, finding one, especially a clean facility, becomes a single focus. In North America, we usually can.

This article ("Mapping Toilets in a Mumbai Slum Yields Unexpected Results" in the NYTimes) on toilet locations in an Indian slum - Cheeta Camp - got my attention.  A MPH student at Harvard mapped the toilets in Cheeta Camp and found there to be roughly 1 toilet for every 170 people.

The map, which you can get to here, is striking. As you look at it and click around on the placemarks, you can quickly see that there just aren't that many toilets. Some don't work. Some are being built. Often there's a fee to use the better toilets. Check out the article and photos too. This a clear example of environmental injustice.

I'll try and remember this next time I'm standing in a long line at a sports event or play, waiting to use the restroom.

Thanks, Beth, for sending this article my way!

New York City in the 1940s

This is a fun map to explore, if you're into old maps and/or NYC. Welcome to 1940s New York City complete with old fashioned-looking banner.  Try searching by address.

Here's more information about the site from the Gothamist mentioning the painstaking scanning by Steve Romalewski.

Food Deserts - It's All In the Mapping

Today's New York Times has a front page article on food deserts in the US by Gina Kolata (Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity). Food deserts are places that are believed to be lacking in healthy and affordable food.  It's long been taken on faith (or personal observation) that it's more unhealthy to live in the inner city or in a rural area than in the suburbs. This article discusses two new reports that show that the food desert concept is not entirely accurate and that some locations may be more akin to 'food swamps.' I think its all in how you use your GIS, the data you enter (by US Census tracts, zip codes areas, or addresses by points), and what you want to find. An example of how to lie with maps?! Perhaps. 

In the article there is a link to the US Department of Agriculture Food Desert Locator that should be checked out. Apparently, I live on the edge of a desert. I kind of don't agree. The downtown shaded tract in the screen capture (along the Hudson River) might be more accurate but not the one near the red dot. Interesting how the three colleges in my neighborhood are not within a 'food desert' tract. Play with the site and see for yourself. Enter an address and take a look.

From the Food Desert Locator About page:

Part of the First Lady's Let's Move! initiative, the proposed Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) will expand the availability of nutritious food to food deserts—low-income communities without ready access to healthy and affordable food—by developing and equipping grocery stores, small retailers, corner stores, and farmers markets with fresh and healthy food. The HFFI is a partnership between the Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, and the Agriculture Department (USDA). 

Wind As A Visualization

A wind map of the lower 48 U.S. states. The first map is zoomed in on the northeast right now and the second are screen shots of past days/times.  The lines indicate wind speed, as "delicate traceries." These lovely visualizations look like salt marsh grasses blowing in the breeze.  If it doesn't work for you, try Chrome.

From the site: "An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. 

This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now." 

Thanks @dianamaps! She posted about this.

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How's Your Cellular Coverage?

I saw this fun site, OpenSignalMaps, that gives web heat maps of cell coverage for the U.S., U.K, Italy, Germany and Spain.

From the site:

"With your help, we're creating a comprehensive database of cell phone towers, cell phone signal strength readings, and Wi-Fi access points around the world. This data is collected via our Android application and uploaded to our servers, taking care to use as little processing power and battery life as possible.

You can use this website to browse the data we've collected, including heat maps that show exactly how strong signal is in any particular area, as well as all the nearby towers for your carrier. Take a look around, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions or feedback."

If you're zoomed in to, say, Poughkeepsie, the coverage is apparently along major roadways and highways.

But if you zoom out, it looks like the coverage in the northeast of the U.S. is "pretty good." Ha! 

Zoom to Germany and see real coverage!

Thanks, Diana, for the tweet.

School (K-12) Geographic Data Available (SABINS)

A new GIS data engine has come along - SABINS (School Attendance Boundary Information System) and seems much like the incredibly rich dataset at NHGIS (National Historical GIS). Tell your Education department members or others on campus who study school systems, student walking distances, and demographic variables within the public schools. I haven't tried using the SABINS site but I used the very similar NHGIS site and wrote about it in the past (here). From the email announcement:

The College of William & Mary and the Minnesota Population Center are pleased to announce the launch of the new School Attendance Boundary Information System (SABINS) website. SABINS is a project funded by the National Science Foundation to assemble, harmonize, and disseminate GIS data for grade-specific school attendance boundaries embedded within school districts throughout the United States. In addition to GIS data for school attendance boundaries, SABINS also provides:

• Census data tabulated for the school attendance boundaries


• Crosswalk tables that link school attendance boundaries to data from the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data

When users visit the SABINS website, they will find:

• A front page providing access to crosswalk tables, FAQs, user guides and data documentation


• A data extract system where they can:
  
  
  
  • download Census data for multiple grade levels in one extract,
  
  
  • download GIS data for multiple grade levels in one extract, and
  
  
  • constrain or expand data searches by specifying any combination of topics or datasets.
  
  
  
  

Looks great and very useful!

Flood Map: Is Your House On High (Enough) Ground?

This Flood Map (in Beta) map helps to visualize where the flood-prone areas are in the event of sea level rise. I am not sure of the accuracy of the map and data, but it is pretty fun to play with. Here is a right-click on Central Park and then putting in a sea-level rise of 20 meters.  One should be okay there but the rest of Manhattan and the five boroughs look pretty dodgy. Put in your home address and rise the sea level then prepare to be shocked.

Heard about this from a Buzz from @DonMeltz.

Hurricane Tracking Map via New York Times

The awesome cartographers at the New York Times strike again, this time giving us a beautiful and interactive web map showing the track, wind speed and the projected track of Hurricane Irene, which is hitting the east coast of the U.S. right now. You can go back and forth between a simple Google Maps basemap or use an aerial photo from today (Aug 26) or August 24. Check the wind speed graph too.

Thanks, @elguary, for the tweet.

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Atlas of Rural and Small Town America

Saw this great web map showing GIS data by counties in the U.S. It's called Atlas of Rural and Small Town America, but it shows the whole country by population, employment, agriculture, and "county classifications." The map above shows the percent of farmland in the U.S. by county (using 2007 data).

And this one above shows the counties by farms involved with Community Supported Agriculture from 2007. An added plus is you can download the U.S. Dept of Agriculture data. 

Seeing this site came on the heels of a New York Times article on mapping broadband access in rural America. Broadband in the Heartland is lacking.  Though the Atlas of Rural America does not show these data (internet access across the country) the article shows a couple of interesting maps.

Factory Farm Web Map for the U.S.

U.S. Census data are used to create this web map showing factory farms in the U.S. In the image above you can see where hog farming is prevalent. The site gives loads of information on how these farms - chickens, cattle and pigs - impact our environment, our food security, the affects on the animals and on our health.

This is a project of Food & Water Watch.

FedEx and Cartograms

I'm not really sure why FedEx - delivers to a changing world - got into the map visualizations game, but take a look at some of the many cartograms of the world. Attached here are recycled paper use by country (largest is China), beer imports (the U.S. leads), and population density (largest Singapore). Click on See Other World Topics and check out the other maps that FedEx has put together. Some look goofy but it's still kind of fun to look at these maps.

Thanks to my friend geoparadigm for tweeting this.

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Restored Map From 1770

Someone at the New York Times loves maps and stories about maps. Yesterday we got a glimpse of a lovingly restored map of the lower New York Harbor drawn in 1770 by cartographer Bernard Ratzer. Here is the Times story but you should really check out the interactive digital image of the map in it's "old" state and then again in the newly rehabilitated state (both shown here from the same location on either map). Check out the west bank of the Hudson River, in New Jersey. All of that swamp land has been filled in to make Hoboken and Jersey City and Ellis Island was called Bucking Island.

They don't make maps like that anymore.

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Census Data Show Immigrants Moving to the Suburbs

The New York Times had more maps on their cover today. This time they are mapping new residents to the U.S.  Oddly enough, immigrants (mapped from 2005 to 2009) seem to be moving to the suburbs rather then the cities or rural areas.

The map above shows the area where I live (Poughkeepsie NY). This is a dot density map by census tract showing a dot for each 50 persons by variable. As you move into the interactive map, the dot density numeration changes. Pretty nice.

Here is the link to the Time's interactive map. It's powered by Google Maps and uses socialexplorer.com.

If you click on More Maps you'll get to choose other variables (by tract for the U.S.) such as Race and Ethnicity, Income, Housing and Families, and Education.

Marine Protected Areas Web Map

Check out this web map called ProtectedPlanet. Giving a worldwide interactive map, you can search for marine protected areas anywhere. Search by place name or species type, or don't search at all and just browse the map. There are lot's of resources like planning documents for MPAs around the world. From the site:

"Be inspired by the most beautiful places on the planet. Explore the worlds national parks, wilderness areas and world heritage sites. Help us find and improve information on every protected area in the world. Protectedplanet.net lets you discover these incredible places through elegant mapping and intuitive searching. Protectedplanet.net wants you to contribute information about protected areas alongside national agencies and international organisations. Protectedplanet.net helps you understand what and where our natural resources are being conserved. If you are interested in analysing a global dataset on protected areas, you can download the data, today, here at protectedplanet.net."

This site is elegant. It's a wiki in that you can add new information, they use relevant Panoramio photos, you can modify the geometry and the text-based information, you can discuss. Above is a screen shot of the area near the Folkstone Marine Reserve on the west coast of Barbados. You can see the outline of the protected area, geolocated photos and information on what you'll find at the Marine Protected Area. I didn't expect there to be much for Barbados but I was wrong, and if Barbados has coverage, then I can imagine that many other places around the world will have the same and this could be the go-to site for up-to-date geoaware information on protected areas.

Thanks for the tweet, Elliot Hartley.