The Maps of the Week

This clever map uses the underlying data for roads in OpenStreetMap to calculate the road orientation patterns for any location. Using the map you can zoom in on any area of the world and a rose diagram displays the road orientation distribution within the current map bounds.

The VeloViewer interactive map allows you to view the road direction pattern for any district or city in the world. You can move the map around and zoom in or out on any location and the rose diagram will update on the fly to show the road direction distribution within the current map view.


The Autocomplete Map Maker is another clever map. Using the application you can create a Google search autocomplete map using any search terms that you want.

Enter search term(s) into the Autocomplete Map Maker (both suffixes and prefixes are accepted) and you can create your own fun map, based on the Google search autocomplete suggestions for your chosen words. For example, for the map above I entered 'why is' as the prefix and 'so' as a suffix and the wizard automatically created a map of US cities based on Google's autocomplete search terms.


This week I also want to give honorable mentions to two experimental transit maps. The MTA.me Conductor has turned Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York subway map into a real-time string instrument. The map visualizes in real-time trains moving on the MTA subway network and plays a note every time a subway train crosses the track of another train.

Bruno Imbrizi's Experiment No.7 is a 3d map of the London Underground, with tube stations and animated real-time trains. The map is fully interactive, so you can pan and zoom the map to explore the depth of the different underground lines.