One wishes for a zoom feature...
Someone should invent something like that, and call it something like "street map."
But it would look particularly neat as a bunch of tiny drawn lines one could zoom into, as opposed to the kind of map whose details change as you zoom in.
a hell of a lot of this country is barely settled
My first impression was more the reverse: the eastern half of the country is astonishingly dense with roadways.
2: And then they could add a little hook to it and they'd be millionaires.
4: Yeah, I was thinking that, too. There's this very sudden drop-off in roads outside of urban centers right down the middle. Even all the way out through California, there's just not that bizarre density. And against a population map, I don't think it matches up exactly like that.
4,7:East is older, and more gridlike. Even though the Dallas residential area I live is pretty dense, 1/8 acre plots shared back fences, there are by design many fewer crosstreets and intersections than the upper Midwest I knew before.
Still very walkable, and I don't know why you would need an intersection every 1/4 mile rather than halfmile.
Environmentally it seems better. A lot of gas is used starting & stopping.
Come to think of it, 8 isn't quite right, because most of the intersections down here in residential areas are T's, partly I think to keep speeds down. I remember the rustbelt as gridded out into really absurd little squares(blocks), 4-6 houses on a side.
Farms on the east coast were set up much earlier than out in the midwest, so I'd imagine the state of farming technology and the local terrain meant they were much smaller and more numerous, so more roads connecting them.
Interesting. Dense set of roads running from Atlanta to Durham.
The Everglades really stand out, too.
Pretty cool. North Dakota actually seems to have surprisingly many roads.
Beginning in Missouri, and especially in Kansas but also Western Minnesota, never farther East, there are county-shaped patches lighter or darker.
Is that a data-collection anomaly, or evidence of the impact of policy at the county level?
Is that a data-collection anomaly, or evidence of the impact of policy at the county level?
The latter, I'd think. A lot of land-use policymaking in this country takes place at the county level.
there are county-shaped patches lighter or darker
The text on the page says,
The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land.
The ones I'm talking about, like the extreme Northeast corner of Missouri, are too far away from cities for that to be the explanation.
To the extent that relief maps are usually darker in mountainous/hilly areas,* this is sort of an inversion. At least in California the Central Valley is covered pretty densely but the Sierras are practically blank.
*I don't know if this is true, but it's my impression. I'm not a big fan of relief maps, so I haven't seen many.
a hell of a lot of this country is barely settled. Maybe Emerson is right about buying land in North Dakota.
There's a *reason* why N. Dakota is barely settled.
Does it rain a lot there or something?
North Dakota actually seems to have surprisingly many roads.
It is really flat so it is easy to set up gravel roads in a grid at section boundaries. So there are in fact quite a few roads. Most of them have very little on them except field accesses and the occasional farmstead though.
Pretty cool, like the lights at night maps, but more detailed.
14: There is clearly some manner of data collection anomalies* going on in the midwest, not just land use. For instance south of Kansas City, two counties , Bates and Vernon show up as much lighter right at county boundaries, anomalies not evident on Google maps or satellite views, it appears not all roads show up on his map. (Maybe in those counties it is just paved roads, or some minimum level of surface, a hypothesis supported by the fact that if you look at the midwest blowup and see the detached pieces of road.)
The data comes from the Census Bureaus's Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system , the anomalies are undoubtedly within those datasets.
Hah, so happens that last week I ground one of those out for Hillsborough, Pinellas and Manatee counties in Florida. Mine have edges of water too. There would be no problem turning my maps (in AutoCAD .dwg format) into a sort-of web-readable .dwf file where you could zoom freely.
Does anyone know where I can get a geo-referenced list of street names? Are street names in TIGER? Nameless lines are kinda vague.
Every bit of the information in that image is contained in the little 3x5 $200 GPS unit sitting on my dashboard. And a whole lot more: latitude/longitude, house numbers, street names, railroads, rivers, etc. etc. I've been in computing for 45 years, and it goggles my mind that they can organize all that, process it, and tell me when to turn left.
As for North Dakota, there are counties in the western part of the state that have so few people left that they're worried that the county will soon have ZERO population, causing all kinds of problems. I'm personally from western SOUTH Dakota, a much more urbane, prosperous, and liberal area. And I happen to own some land that I'm offering at a very nice price (Euros only, please).