Straats & Grachts

Last week Giuseppe Sollazzo (@puntofisso) created some very interesting static maps of UK cities, on which roads are colored by their suffixes or name endings (eg Road, Street, Avenue etc). Giuseppe's maps proved very popular and lots of people have been inspired to create their own maps for other cities around the world.

By coincidence in December Mapbox created an interactive map to demo their new 'in' expression. This expression allows you to search 'in' place-names. For example it allows you to search within road names for all examples of 'road', 'avenue', 'street' etc. Mapbox's demo A Map of City Roads shows this in action by coloring all streets by the suffix used. The result is an interactive map which is very similar to Giuseppe's static maps.

A Map of City Roads works very well in English speaking countries but obviously doesn't pick-up the different road suffixes used in other languages. The Factbeast was inspired by puntofisso to create a number of static maps showing Dutch Streets Colored by Street Names. Seeing Factbeast's static maps of Dutch cities inspired me in turn to create an interactive map of Dutch roads.

My Straats & Grachts interactive map is a straight clone of Mapbox's A Map of City Roads. All I've done is to color roads based on Dutch road endings (eg weg, straat, gracht and laan) rather than by English road endings. I've also changed the drop-down menu to pan to Dutch rather than American cities.

I've also created a French version of my map. Rues & Avenues colors the roads in French towns and cities based on road types found in France, for example - Rue, Avenue, Voie and Boulevard. If you like this French map then you might also like Les types de voies à Paris, an interactive map which allows you to view the distribution and location of all 45 different types of road in the French capital.

By far the most popular type of road in Paris is the simple 'rue' or road. 3,422 or 57% of all roads in Paris are 'rues'. The second most popular type of road is 'place' (549). The third most popular type of road is 'voie' (433).

If you live in Spain then you might prefer the Calle interactive map. This Spanish version of the map colors roads based on types of Spanish road, for example Calle, Avenida, Paseo and Plaza. I've left Barcelona out of the drop-down menu of cities because the map doesn't work in Barcelona, where they use Catalan road types instead of Castillian names for the different types of road.

Road Type Maps:

English
Spanish
French
Dutch