Free Styling with Mapbox, Google & Maputnik

Google has extended custom map styles to the Google Maps APIs for iOS and Android. This means that you can now use the same custom map style across different platforms.

The Google Maps API allows you to change the colors of different map element and to define which map elements are visible. To start creating your own custom map style you can play with the new Google Maps APIs Styling Wizard. The wizard allows you to quickly adjust the number of labels, landmarks and roads that are visible on the map. It also contains a number of pre-designed themes, such as the vintage and night-time map styles.

If you want to change the look of your map style even further just click on the 'more options' button. This will allow you to control which feature types you wish to display in your style and allow you to change their appearance on the map.

You can learn more about custom map styles in the Google Maps API documentation for Android, iOS and JavaScript.

The Google Maps API doesn't have as many styling features as Mapbox Studio. In particular Google still doesn't allow you to change the fonts of map labels. An option that Mapbox Studio has had from the start. Choosing and adding your own fonts for place-labels really does allow you to create distinctive custom map styles. The new Mapbox Studio dataset editor also allows you to add and customize the look of your own map data directly within the same styling browser interface.


If Mapbox Studio feels too proprietary for your needs, and you want to create and serve your own custom map tiles, then you might want to support Maputnik. Maputnik is a new browser based map styling editor for creating custom Mapbox GL styles.

The Maputnik editor is very similar in design and use to Mapbox Studio but is open source and will run on your own desktop computer. The editor allows you to add and control the visibility of a range of map elements and define their colors.

To add your Maputnik created custom map style to a map you just need to download the Maputnik generated JSON style document. You can then use the style by pointing to the JSON file from your Mapbox GL maps.

Maputnik is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to develop the project further. You can also view the current project code for Maputnik on GitHub.

Where could you walk in ten minutes?

Urbica has released a new travel time interactive map called Galton. The map can help you discover how far you can walk or drive in ten minute increments in major cities around the world.

To find out how far you can walk or drive in ten or twenty minutes you just need to move the black dot on the map to the starting point of your journey. The dark blue area will then show you how far you can walk (or drive) in ten minutes. While the light blue area shows where you could walk in twenty minutes.

The travel time algorithm used by Galton uses the Open Source Routing Machine with OpenStreetMap map data to work out the travel time distances. The project code of Galton is open and available on GitHub. You can also learn more about Galton and how it was developed on the Urbica blog.

Mapping China's Foreign Investment

Over the last month there has been a sudden surge of interactive maps exploring China's growing influence as a global super power.

In One Belt, One Road the Financial Times mapped some of the huge infrastructure projects China has undertaken to connect central Asia with the rest of the world. In Chinese Aid in the Pacific the Lowy Institute has mapped Chinese aid projects in the Pacific islands region. The Center for Strategic & International Studies has also mapped China's territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea.

The New York Times has now mapped China's overseas investments from 2005-2013. The World According to China features a series of maps showing where and how much China has invested in other countries.

The maps show how Chinese investment has grown substantially since 2005. They also show how China has invested heavily in politically sensitive countries such as North Korea and Myanmar, countries western investors tend to avoid. China has also invested heavily in resource rich countries in Africa and the Middle East, with 'autocratic governments and struggling economies.

The result of this investment is that China has locked up many important oil and construction contracts in countries where Western governments would like to see economic reform and improving environmental standards. Thus making it harder for the west to push for political reforms in these countries.

America's Contaminated Drinking Water Map

In 1993 Erin Brockovich brought litigation against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for the contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium in the California town of Hinkley. The case led to the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit.

In 2016 the drinking water of two-thirds of Americans is contaminated with the same carcinogenic chemical. The Environmental Working Group has released an interactive map which allows you to find out the levels of Chromium-6 contamination in community water utilities across the United States. The EWG's Chemical Taints in Tap Water map provides a choropleth map view of the average levels of contamination found in community water utility tests at the individual county level.

If you select a county on the map you can discover the number of water systems in the county which have tested positive for chromium-6 and the number of samples which tested positive. You can also view details on the average level of chromium-6 discovered. As a guide to reading these levels you might want to consider that California has a public health goal of a maximum of 0.02 parts per billion of chromium-6 in drinking water.

Mapping Germany's Power Sources

By 2020 Germany wants 18% of its energy to come from renewable sources. By the same date it wants to cut emissions by 40%. To achieve this goal Germany needs to drastically reduce its reliance on coal and oil fueled power.

Carbon Brief's Power Sources in Germany is an interactive map which visualizes Germany’s electricity generating capacity. The map allows you to view the power sources and capacity of Germany's power plants.

You can use the map menu to filter the electricity generating plants by type. This allows you to view the distribution of different power sources and view the total amount of energy produced by each type of power source. For example, if you select wind power from the menu, you can see that it currently contributes 44,983 MW of Germany's 191,153 MW of power. You can also see on the map how wind power is concentrated in the north of the country, particularly along the North Sea coast.

Connecting the Arctic

The Arctic Sensor Web Platform is an interactive map of real-time sensors across the Arctic. The map allows anyone to access real-time information about current weather conditions throughout the polar region.

The sensor readings can be accessed simply by clicking the markers on the map. Each sensor provides information on the current weather conditions, for example the temperature, wind speed, precipitation and visibility. The map menu allows you to filter the sensors shown on the map by country.

The Arctic Sensor Web Platform uses the Arctic Web Map, an Arctic specific web mapping tool, consisting of an Arctic-focused tile server, and a Leaflet-based client library. The Arctic Web Map uses a Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area view of the North Pole region. This means that the North Pole on the Arctic Web Map is not as distorted as it is in a Mercator projection, as used by Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and other popular web maps.

The 68 Stations of Montreal

CBC Radio Canada has carried out an analysis of the people who live around every one of Montreal's 68 metro stations. Les 68 Stations de Métro de Montréal allows you to view a range of different demographic and economic data about the population living around each station.

The interactive map at the top of the page allows you to select from a number of different filters to view data such as the immigrant population, the individual & family income and the number of residents who have been to university. Each of these data sets are represented on map by scaled circular markers over each station. The colors of the circles are determined by the line's color on the Montreal Metro map.

There is a good analysis of the differences in the populations on each subway line and around different stations beneath the map. This analysis takes the form of a story map. I particularly like how all the place-names in this text are colored by line and how, if you hover over a place-name in the text, its location is also highlighted on the map.

10 Downing Street on Street View

You can now take a walk around 10 Downing Street on Google Street View. 10 Downing Street is the headquarters of Her Majesty's Government. It has also traditionally served as the home of British Prime Ministers.

10 Downing Street uses the same technology as Dr Who's Tardis and is therefore actually a lot bigger than it appears from the outside. So to help you navigate around the home of the British government here are some quick links to some of the many rooms in 10 Downing Street.

First (ground) Floor
Entrance Hall
The Pillard Room
The Terracotta Room
The White Drawing Room
The Main Staircase

Second Floor
Small Dining Room (Breakfast Room)
State Dining Room

Third Floor
Cabinet Room
The Study

You can also tour the White House on Street View. Here is a guide containing some quick links to some of the White House's most famous rooms on Google Maps Street View.

Mapping Berlin's Election

Yesterday voters in Berlin went to the polls in the 2016 Berlin state election. Angela Merkel's centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party achieved its lowest ever result in Berlin. getting just 17.5% of the vote. The anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party achieved a frightening 14.1%. The Social Democrats (SPD) got the most votes of any party, with 21.6% of the vote.

The Berliner Morgenpost's 2016 Berlin Election map allows you to see how each party performed in every election seat. Each electoral area on the map is colored to represent the political party that got the highest share of the vote.

If you click on a party name in the map legend you can also see the ten districts where the party got its highest share of the the vote. For example, if you click on 'AfD' you can see that the anti-immigration party got its biggest share of the vote in seats which were in the old East Germany.

You can view the Berliner Morgenpost's analysis of the vote by using the links running along the bottom of the map. The 'Rechtruck' link, for example, shows a choropleth view of the AfD's vote share across the capital. This shows that the party performed reasonably well across the city and only failed to get below 5% of the vote in 33 of the 653 electoral areas.

Maps of the Week

Bath Strava Metro 2015 is a very impressive mapped visualization of Strava cycling data in the city of Bath. One of the most impressive aspects of this map is the number of options it provides to explore all aspects of the data, and what this reveals about cycling in the city.

The map allows you to explore the roads with the most and least cycling traffic. If you zoom in on the map numbers appear which reveal the total number of cyclists recorded on each section of the city's roads. If you click on the numbers you can view more details about cycling traffic on this section of road, such as the number of cyclists traveling in each direction, and the average speed of cyclists (in both directions).

You can learn more about the map and how it was made on the Bath: Hacked blog.


China is busy building the infrastructure to connect central Asia with the rest of the world. In One Belt, One Road the Financial Times explores some of the construction projects being designed to transport people and goods within the region and further afield.

The map uses the Mapbox GL story map template to scroll and pan a map of the region to show the various railway lines, roads and gas pipelines that have already been constructed or are in the process of being built. These construction projects include gas pipelines between China and Central Asia, the China to Pakistan highway and new high speed rail lines throughout the region.


The European Space Agency's Star Mapper is a map of 59,921 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. ESA's Hipparcos undertook the first space mission entirely dedicated to astronomy. During its mission Hipparcos measured the position, motion and distance of more than 100,000 stars.

One cool feature of the Star Mapper is the 'Motion' animation. If you select the Motion option you can view an animation of the stars moving across the night sky, in 1,000 year increments. You can also select the rewind button to observe how the stars appeared in the night sky in the past.