The Leaflet Maps of the Week

There has been some great maps this week. Some of them were created with the Google Maps API and some of them with the Leaflet mapping platform. This week I've decided to split the Maps of the Week round-up into two posts. Later I'll look at the best Google Maps of the past week, but first let's take a look at the best Leaflet maps featured on Google Maps Mania in the last seven days.

By far the most viewed map on Google Maps Mania this week was Donut Holes in International Waters. This post had six times more page views than the next most viewed post on Google Maps Mania (which was news of Google Maps' new historic Street View imagery option - Time Travel with Street View).

Donut Holes in International Waters is an interactive map showing who has sovereignty over seas around the world. The map also highlights 'doughnut holes', areas which are designated as international waters and which can be areas of territorial dispute between different countries.

To create the map the author, Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, had to design an interactive map that included the state maritime borders defining each country's sovereignty over the world's seas. He also had to create his own bathymetry layer.

A post on the CartoDB Blog explains in some detail how Dmitriy created his beautiful looking maritime map.


Biking from Place to Place is a neat Leaflet map visualization of Chicago's bike share network. The map uses a very clever Voronoi heat map technique which allows you to find out the number of bike trips from any bike station and view the most popular destinations from each station.

Select a bike station on the map and you can view a heat map showing the most popular destinations from that station. The map provides some interesting insights into the travel patterns of Divvy bike users. For example, if you select a bike station along Lake Michigan you quickly notice that most Divvy users borrow bikes here to cycle to other bike stations along the lake shore.

The heat map overlay uses a very clever Voronoi map technique which allows you to find the nearest bike station to any location. If you point to any location on the map the nearest bike station is automatically selected for you and the Voronoi heat map overlay also shows you the areas around the destination stations.


Trip Risk is a neat route-planning map for Melbourne, Australia which displays accident black spots along suggested routes. The map uses open sourced data on car crashes, from the State Government of Victoria, to not only suggest a driving route but also show you all the car crashes that have taken place along that route.

The crash markers along the suggested route are sized to represent the total number of crashes at each location. You can click on the crash markers to view the number of crashes at a location and the total number of people involved in crashes. A red dot signifies a crash that involved a fatality.

The results displayed on the map can also be filtered by speed and by accident type.