Stores that closed on famous shopping streets

Pre-pandemic, we walked around shopping areas casually browsing, but a lot of retail didn’t make it through. For Quartz, Amanda Shendruk looks at the closures on famous shopping streets, complete with a location-appropriate vehicle to drive in and a police car that appears if you scroll too fast.

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Make a streets map of anywhere in the world

Following up on his mini-app to draw ridgeline maps for elevation, Andrei Kashcha made a tool to draw a streets map of anywhere in the world.

Enter a city, and using data from OpenStreetMap, you’ve got yourself a map for export. You can also easily change the color scheme to your liking, which is fun to play with as you scroll back and forth.

Finally, Kashcha also put the code up on GitHub.

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Analysis of street network orientation in cities

Continuing his analysis of street grid-iness in cities around the world, Geoff Boeing sorted cities by the amount of order in their street networks:

Across these study sites, US/Canadian cities have an average orientation-order nearly thirteen-times greater than that of European cities, alongside nearly double the average proportion of four-way intersections. Meanwhile, these European cities’ streets on average are 42% more circuitous than those of the US/Canadian cities. North American cities are far more grid-like than cities in the rest of the world and exhibit far less orientation entropy and street circuity.

Chicago is all grid. Charlotte not so much.

See the detailed study that Boeing published in Applied Network Science.

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Street names as a proxy for history and culture

From Streetscapes by Zeit:

Street names are stories of life. They tell us something about how the people in a given place work and live, what they believe in and their dreams. There are more than a million streets and squares in Germany. ZEIT ONLINE has compiled a database of the roughly 450,000 different names used. Some street names are used hundreds of times and others only once. But none of the names were chosen at random.

It’s for street names in Germany, so the meaning might be lost for many of you, but much of the data comes from OpenStreetMap, which should mean something like this is doable for other cities and countries.

See also the San Francisco history of street names mapped by Noah Veltman a few years ago. [via @maartenzam]

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Posted by in maps, streets, Zeit

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Interactive to see street orientation everywhere

After seeing polar charts of street orientation in major cities, Vladimir Agafonkin, an engineer at Mapbox, implemented an interactive version that lets you see directions for everywhere:

Extracting and processing the road data for every place of interest to generate a polar chart seemed like too much work. Could I do it on an interactive map? It turns out that this is a perfect use case for Mapbox vector maps — since the map data is there on the client, we can analyze and visualize it instantly for any place in the world.

Fun.

So someone’s going to take the next step to rank and rate griddyness around the world, right?

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Street network orientation in major cities

Using OpenStreetMap data, Geoff Boeing charted the orientation distributions of major cities:

Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar’s direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings.

So you can easily spot the gridded street networks, and then there’s Boston and Charlotte that are a bit nutty. Check out Boeing’s other chart for orientation of major non-US cities.

See also Stephen Von Worley’s color-coded maps and Seth Kadish’s charts from 2014 that showed the same thing but used Census data instead of OpenStreetMap.

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One square mile in different cities

As part of his dissertation, Geoff Boeing generated these maps that show one square mile of road network in select cities.

To compare urban form in different kinds of places, these visualizations have depicted some downtowns, some business parks, and some suburban residential neighborhoods. These patterns also vary greatly within cities: Portland’s suburban east side looks very different than its downtown, and Sacramento’s grid-like downtown looks very different than its residential suburbs. These visualizations, rather, show us how different urbanization patterns and paradigms compare at the same scale.

Roll your own using Boeing’s OpenStreetMap-based Python package, OSMnx. Just one line of code.

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Your street name across the country

Street names

Here's a fun searchable map from the New York Times. Enter a street's name, and you can see how many other streets have the same name in other states. Based on Zillow data, you also get a quick comparison of estimated worth of houses on your street versus homes with the same street name but different suffix.

See also the word cloud version of the same data.

Word street cloud

And finally, before you start going all crazy with word clouds in your PowerPoint slides, read Gregor Aisch's about design choice.

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