Maps of the Week

My favorite map of this last week has to be Brand New Subway. Not only does Brand New Subway let you create your very own New York subway system it also works out how many passengers your network would attract,

Brand New Subway allows you to tear up the New York transit map and start from scratch. You can build subway lines anywhere you like in the city and place subway stations where ever you want. As you create your new map Brand New Subway will even estimate how many passengers will use your map and how much each fare is likely to cost.

When you add a station to the map a number of data sources (census data, jobs data, existing transportation demand, etc.) are used to estimate the station's ridership. The same data is used to estimate the daily ridership on your whole new subway system.


Greece is home to around 57,000 refugees. Most of them now live in over 40 refugee camps dotted around the country. This American Life sent a team of architects and engineers to map and investigate life in a few of these camps.

Hockey & Baseball Refugees is an online documentary exploring the situation faced by refugees living in Greek refugee camps. These camps are housed in an abandoned beach resort, an Olympic baseball stadium, an air force base, a highway rest stop and the grounds of an old psychiatric hospital.

The Hockey & Baseball Refugees documentary uses a collection of aerial views, oblique views and architectural drawings to provide visual tours of the five featured camps. These visual representations of the camps are accompanied by photographs and videos documenting the conditions in the camps.


Earlier this year Mark Evans created a wonderful mapped visualization of commuting flows in the USA. These hypnotic animated maps show workers traveling to and from American cities. Mark has now created a similar visualization showing the commuting flows in English & Welsh cities.

Mark's new Commute Map of England & Wales replicates the U.S. map, only this time it shows where people commute from into towns and cities in the UK. Using the two drop-down menus above the map you can select a region and then an individual city or town.

After you select an individual location the map animates the commuting flow into the city in the morning and then the commuting flow as workers return home in the evening. The four locations where the most workers commute from are indicated by the colored moving dots on the map.

Free Maps from USGS & NatGeo

National Geographic has released a great new service which allows you to print free USGS Quad maps. It's also very simple to use. It allows you to just zoom in on your area of interest, select the Quad Map that you want and press print.

USGS's 7.5-minute quadrangle maps are topographical maps covering an area of 49 to 70 square miles. Using NatGeo's PDF Quads interactive map you can quickly find the USGS quad that you want and then download it as a PDF which has been optimized for printing.

Each quad downloads as a 5 page PDF. The first page provides an overview of the quad. Pages 2 to 5 are the standard USGS Quads cut into quarters to fit on standard printers.

If you want or need more control over the map area that you wish to print then you could try CalTopo. CalTopo allows you to print maps using the 1:24000 USGS scale. CalTopo also includes a whole range of other options, such as allowing you to plot hiking routes, measure the length of your hikes and compute elevation profiles.

Sky Diving Without A Parachute

Would you jump out of a plane at 25,000 feet without a parachute? Luke Atkins did. Last week Luke jumped from a plane over Sim Valley in California and, without the aid of a parachute, he free-fell 25,000 into a 100-by-100-foot safety net.

If you want to get a sense of what a free-fall from 25,000 feet is actually like, without putting yourself at serious risk of death, then you can try Darren Wien's Skydive Sim. Skydive Sim uses Cesium to recreate Luke Atkin's 25,000 free-fall over Sim Valley.

The simulation starts at 25,000 feet over California. The 100-by100-foot safety net is represented by a red square on the ground. As you free-fall you can use the W, A, S, D keys on your keyboard to adjust your position. You fall at a rate of 120 mph so you might not want to veer too far from that net on the ground!


You can also use Google's own Map Dive game to practice your free-fall skills. In Map Dive you get to free fall on top of Google Maps and then land on famous monuments around the world.

During your descent, as you free-fall towards your destination on the ground, you need to steer Pegman through a series of hoops. You gain points in the game by successfully steering through the red & white hoops and by collecting the floating stars. It's even trickier than it sounds.

The Burrito Eater's Problem

On Monday Maps Mania featured Randy Olson's Optimal Road Trip of U.S. National Parks. Randy's map is an example of solving the Traveling Salesman Problem. This problem involves finding the most efficient route taking in a number of different waypoints. Randy's map shows the most efficient route for visiting all 47 national parks within the contiguous states of the USA.

If you want to create your own optimal route maps then you can use Mapzen's Optimized Route API. This service allows you to find the optimal route for a list of locations, using your first location in the list as the starting point and the last location as the ending point.

You can view the API in action on a new demo map which Mapzen published today on its blog. Optimizing Your Route explains how you can use the Optimized Route API. To illustrate the blog post Mapzen has created an optimal route of some of San Francisco's best burrito restaurants. If you move the markers on the map the route automatically updates to show the new optimal route taking in the new location.

The Cost of Driving

Nearly all major highways in Brazil have tolls. Many of these tolls are expensive and make driving a costly enterprise for the average Brazilian.

Qualp is a new service for Brazilian drivers which provides driving directions with the latest information on toll costs. Using the service drivers can not only get driving directions for a route but also find out how much the trip will cost.

After entering a starting point and destination (you can also add any number of waypoints for your trip) Qualp displays your route on a Google Map and tells you the total amount you will have to pay in tolls. All the toll stations along the route are indicated by markers on the map and the map sidebar shows how much each toll station will cost.

The prices and locations of toll stations are updated daily so all the information provided by Qualp is as accurate as possible. Qualp also includes the option to view real-time traffic conditions along your route.

The Favela is a Blank Spot on the Map

In the run-up to the Rio Olympic games a lot has been written about the city's favelas. Much of this interest in the favelas has concentrated on the poverty, crime and violence in these neighborhoods and on the policies and actions of the police and city authorities to try to 'pacify' the favelas before the Olympic games.

Google has instead decided to look a little more closely at the lives, ambitions and successes of some of the individuals who live in Rio's favelas. Beyond the Map - the Unexpected World of the Favelas is an interactive tour around Rio which concentrates on a number of individuals who have grown-up in the city's favelas.

This interactive documentary takes you on a tour of Rio in which you get to meet individuals who have grown-up in the favelas. The documentary uses a number of 360 degree interactive videos which transport you around the city. At each stop on the journey you can watch a videoed interview with a local citizen in which you get to learn a little about their lives and dreams.

The use of aerial imagery, 360 degree videos and YouTube interviews provides a great introduction to the city and an interesting insight into life in the favelas.

Build Your Own Subway

It's time to tear down the New York City subway system and start again from scratch. The New York City Council's Department of Transportation has decided that you are the best person for this job. They have therefore asked you to completely redesign the city's subway system and create a better NYC Subway map.

Brand New Subway is an awesome interactive map which allows you to create your very own New York subway system. You can build subway lines anywhere in the city and place subway station where ever you want. As you create your new map Brand New Subway will estimate how many passengers will use your map and how much each fare is likely to cost.

When you add a station to the map a number of data sources (census data, jobs data, existing transportation demand, etc.) are used to estimate the station's ridership. The same data is used to estimate the daily ridership on your whole new subway system. As you build your city-wide subway system you might want to keep a check on the estimated single-ride MetroCard fare. This is calculated based on the construction and maintenance costs of the stations & tracks that you have added to your new New York City subway system.

Mapbox Story Maps

A very quick way to create an effective scroll-driven story map is to use Mapbox GL. The advantage of using Mapbox GL over some other mapping libraries is that Mapbox GL allows you not only to zoom and pan the map but to rotate the map to provide different perspectives on your featured locations

If you want to create a Mapbox GL story map there is also the added advantage that Mapbox has provided a great template in their list of 'example' maps. The Fly to a location based on scroll position map in the Mapbox GL examples provides a neat demo of the possibilities of a Mapbox GL story map. All you have to do to create your own story map is copy & paste the provided code and change the content to suit the story you want to tell.

For example, this week the Baltimore Sun used Mapbox' example map to quickly create a story map to report on the devastating flood which hit Ellicot City on Saturday evening. The Ellicot City Flood Map provides a chronological mapped timeline of the evening's events and the damage caused by the flood.

As you scroll through the chronological narrative the currently active information boxes become visible and the map pans, zooms and rotates to provide aerial views of the areas being discussed in the timeline.


Another example of a Mapbox GL story map is Birmingham Eastside's Gentrification in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Birmingham Eastside has used the Mapbox GL demo map to create a mapped guide to how gentrification is affecting Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.

As you scroll through the map you are taken on a tour of the neighborhood, highlighting some of the biggest changes in the area. The Gentrification in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter map also features map markers which provide another level of interactivity to the map. These markers provide additional information and media - such as audio recordings of interviews with some of the individuals featured in the side-panel content.


Mapbox have also used their own story map format to create a map of the intriguing case of Robert Durst. Durst was arrested on a first-degree murder warrant. If convicted he could face the death penalty.

Following the Life and Death of Robert Durst plots the key movements and actions of Robert Durst since his first wife 'disappeared' three decades ago up until his arrest in New Orleans. As well as the scroll-driven narration and up-dating map 'Following the Life and Death of Robert Durst' uses map markers and polylines to track Durst's movements around the country and to connect all the featured locations together.

Maps in the Unity Game Engine

Google today released a pretty amazing game which allows you to fly over the Himalayas, run up mountains and skate upon icy lakes. Verne - The Himalayas uses Google Map's 3d imagery to create a game world which you can explore as a Yeti named Verne.

The game uses Google Map's 3d imagery inside the Unity Game Engine. By coincidence Mapbox today published open-sourced code on Github which allows you to use Mapbox maps within Unity. If you want to use real-world locations in your Unity created games or create the next Pokemon Go type game then you might want to check-out the brief instructions to using the Mapbox plug-in for Unity on the Mapbox blog.

South Africa's Political Killings

Today South Africans are voting in the 2016 Municipal Elections. The ANC has dominated the political landscaped in South Africa since the end of Apartheid. However the poor economy and corruption scandals centered on president Jacob Zuma could seriously damage the ANC's performance in today's election.

The corruption charges against the South African president are not the only problems that the ANC have faced in the run-up to today's election. Over the last three week's a number of mostly ANC politicians have been murdered. More than a dozen politicians have been killed and not one case has been solved.

South African newspaper the Mail & Guardian has mapped all of this year's political assassinations. The Mail & Guardian has used the Esri Story Map template to map the killings. This means that you can explore each assassination by selecting the markers on the map or you can use the forward and back buttons on the map to progress through the killings one by one.

The name of each politician, their political party and the date of the murder are given for each assassination. Where the Mail & Guardian have reported on an assassination a link is also provided to the newspaper's report.