Inspired by The Errant Isle of Manhattan, I decided to see what New York City looked like compared to other American metropolitan areas.

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So, what happens when two geographers get to sitting around and drinking, talking about maps and stuff? This:

My good friend Stef made this map of all the area codes that Ludacris mentions in the song ‘Area Codes‘ and a mere 12 hours later it has made it’s way clear across the internets and interdigs.

It’s been a while since I last posted here but going to school and working full time, as well as building another website, has taken over most of my time, so here is a quick update.

Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia transit maps! I finally got around to doing something with all these transit maps I was making. Unfortunately Google is weird about what maps they allow and don’t allow you to embed on a web page so for the time being I am just posting links to the maps. They are just first drafts but all the lines are there. When I have more time I plan on going through and adding more information to each map. Someone asked me to include stations which is on my to do list but because Google Maps already has stations with information about them for most cities I am going to hold off on this.

San Francisco Transit
Philadelphia Transit
Boston Transit

I have also redrawn the New York & New Jersey Subways map so each line has a nice image in the information box that leads to the line schedule at MTA.info.

Lastly, here is a new map of the MBTA as it should look today with the Green Line and Blue Line extensions marked as in planning and the Indigo Line (Fairmount Branch CR) distinguished as an actual rapid transit line. I heard a story that at a community meeting a few years ago someone in the audience mentioned that the branch was not on the map, which confused the people from the MBTA because it was. What the man really meant was that the line was marked as commuter rail (which is what it is) and not rapid transit. If you want to get people to think about it as rapid transit you needed to show it as a rapid transit line on the map the same as the Red or Orange Lines. This doesn’t mean it will be converted to heavy rail, which is not a good idea since this is the only other route into the city from the southwest other than the Southwest Corridor, but you can change the way people perceive the line just by changing how wide the line is on the map (which is one reason I like maps so much).

Continuing with my subway system maps, today I add the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit.

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I am also creating a new section for these maps. I plan on also creating system maps with extensions, like the Future MBTA, but for all these other systems.

Here is the brand spanking new map of all the transit systems in the New York City area. That includes the MTA, PATH, AirTrain, Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, and the Newark City Subway.

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I finally figured out how to embed a Google Map in a post so now I will be updating the site with all sorts of cool maps.

The first is the Unbuilt Highways of New York City which is one I posted a link to last month and one I have been getting a lot of traffic from ever since Google added it to their “Custom Maps” content.

The second is the Unbuilt Highways of Boston which is newly expanded.

The third is the Unbuilt Highways of Albany, NY which is tiny but dear to my heart as I grew up in the area.

The last is the Unbuilt Highways of Providence, RI.

All of these maps are works in progress as Google is always adding new stuff and I just can’t leave my work “finished”.

I-30, I-35E, I-40 - Dallas, TX. I have always been fascinated by so called traffic machines. Traffic engineers apparently though it was a good idea to loop downtowns with giant highways, funneling traffic in and out of downtown every morning and night. These are the moats of the 20th century, keeping downtowns safe from undesirables that live just past the edge but allowing the people wealthy enough to afford a house in the suburbs and a car to drive into town. But like any wall that protects, it also strangles what it surrounds. When the cars leave there is no life here. Lights turn on but no one is home. Subways help but only go so far when an area is cut off from foot traffic. What amazes me is the willingness to destroy a city just for convenience.

US Route 101, I-5, I-10 - Los Angeles, CA. There is nothing that says L.A. like a freeway. As someone who has grown up on the East Coast the highway mentality is something quite strange to me. 12 lanes of concrete and assault and it isn’t enough? But I do have to give it to L.A., they do highways right. They looked at New York and said let’s do the complete opposite of that. Jane Jacobs didn’t think much of L.A. but that was because she was a creature of New York. L.A. is decentralized while New York is highly centralized, but at the same time L.A. is one of the densest cities in America. Thankfully they realize that ever expanding highways will only lead to more congestion, but we should sit back and marvel at the web they have constructed.

MI Route 5, I-275, I-96, I-696 - Detroit, MI. When I see this all I can think of is some traffic engineer saying, “We got all this space, lets stretch our legs.” This resembles a creature pulled from the deep or some strange amoebic creature. The other two interchanges made me think about what we have done to cities, this one just makes me smile.

Google Maps recently added a new feature where you can create your own maps and needless to say it is pretty awesome. They are great for making a quick map for someone to show them how to get some place but they are also great for the type of stuff I do. After playing around with it I came up with three maps, all unbuilt highways for Albany NY, New York City, and Boston. Whats even better is that you can download these maps and view them in Google Earth by clicking on the KLM button on the top right.

The first map I made was the unbuilt highways in Albany, NY. These were based on information from Capital Highways, a web site about highways in upstate New York. There are a number of large interchanges with ramps to no-where in Albany and this explains what happened to them. The blue line represents the Mid-Crosstown Arterial which would have cut straight through the heart of Albany and Washington Park. I-678 which would have bypassed the interchange of I-87 and I-90 in Colonie and gone directly to Albany International Airport. This off ramp is all that was ever built of the highway, which now serves as a connection to an office park. Finally the red line represents what would have been a spur off of I-90 through Rensselaer and connected with the Dunn Memorial Bridge. You can see where the bridge stops in mid-air here, where it would have continued east to connect with I-90.

The next map was for Boston, MA. In the Future MBTA section for the Orange Line I talk about how the current Orange Line was built in land cleared for the extension of I-95 into Boston. Here you can see what I was talking about along with the other highways that were to plow through the city. This map was based on information from Boston’s Canceled Highways. The red line represents I-95, both the northern section that would have run through Lynn Woods and the southern section which would have run through Hyde Park and Roxbury. The green line represents I-695, or the Inner Belt which would have ripped through Cambridge and Roxbury, almost completely leveling Cambridgeport for a gigantic interchange at the Mass Pike. You can see the remnants of the highway here where there are dead off ramps off of I-93 (and there is also a road called Innerbelt Road) and here, which was turned into Melnea Cass Boulevard. The yellow line represents Route 2, which today ends abruptly at Alewife but was supposed to carry on further into Cambridge. The blue and purple line represent Route 3 and an elevated relocation of the Mystic Valley Parkway, respectively. You can see the unbuilt portion of Route 3 at the interchange at Route 128. Each would have destroyed the picturesque, tree lined parkway that exists today.

The last map I made was for New York, NY. These are based off of the unbuilt highways section of NYCRoads.com, which is a fantastic resource. Not all of these were Robert Moses highways but many, such as the bridges across Long Island Sound, were. Some were merely ideas for expanding roads rather than actually building new highways, of which Queens Boulevard is a good example. There are far too many for me to talk about here but if you click on the road you will see information about it and a link the it’s page on NYCRoads.com.

Edit: I have now added these maps to this site, check out the Unbuilt Highways section for these and more.

I am finally getting around to update the Future MBTA section of this website. I have created all new maps, ones that show the entire region, ones that show possible extensions for certain areas, and even a giant Commuter Rail map. I also have changed the background maps from the state satellite images to the Google Maps map. They are not interactive though, still working on that. I have also moved all my images off to Flickr to save bandwidth and prevent image leeching. I have rewritten the Red Line page and will rewrite most of the other pages in time. I also hope to actually write a full page on the Urban Ring proposals rather than the brief overview I threw up there a long time ago.