It has been a while since I shared a Kickstarter campaign on the blog and this one caught my attention:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1505932940/map-art-prints/widget/card.html?v=2
If you can’t see the project embedded above, click here.
The project is colorful abstract art maps of anywhere in the world. You can also choose whatever color theme you want.
I think these are beautiful. The print at the top of this post is Rome.
PLOS One recently published a paper and a set of maps that looks at commuter flows across the United States (over 4 million data points). The objective was to identify all of the country’s “megaregions.”
Here is one of those maps. I think it says a lot.
We often think of cities as having discrete boundaries and population counts, but the reality is that studies and maps such as these provide a much better sense of the overall economic geography of a place.
It’s worth noting that the commuter dataset used for this study is from 2006-2010. So things may look a bit different today. The full report can be found here.
Starting today and running until the end of March, the City of Toronto, the Toronto Transit Commission, and Metrolinx will be hosting several public meetings as they work towards planning out this city and region’s rapid transit network.
Below are a few of the key maps from their presentation.
Here is what Toronto’s rapid transit network looks like today (the hollow lines represent projects in construction):
Here is what will be built within the next 6 years:
And here is what they are recommending should be built within the next 15 years:
It’s hard not to get excited when you see maps like this. Of course, it’s a lot easier to draw lines on a map then it is to fund and execute on projects like this.
But I think it all starts with us acknowledging that these initiatives are critical to both our economic competitiveness as a city region and our quality of life as citizens of it. Because if this is something we really want, then we can absolutely make it happen.
Click here if you’d like to see the full presentation and also the public meeting dates/times.