I’ve been meaning to write this post for about a week now. I stumbled upon a set of maps via FlowingData that used public running data to plot where people run in various cities around the world. And since I love maps, I couldn’t resist.

Here’s Toronto:

Here’s New York:

Here’s San Francisco:

And here’s Philadelphia:

For the full set of maps, click here.

What’s interesting is how people tend to gravitate towards the water rather than the parks. In the case of Toronto, High Park is barely touched, which may have something to do with the fact that it’s too far from downtown. The data could also be skewed based on the type of people who make their running data available and where they happen to live.

Either way, a neat set of maps.

As I was browsing Tumblr this morning, I came across this image (linked from Quora):

On the left is portion of Florence. And on the right is a single highway interchange in Atlanta. Both maps are at exactly the same scale.

It’s a stark reminder of how varying land use patterns can be. On the left you have a dense and walkable city, and on the right you have an area that would be entirely inhospitable to pedestrians.