Maps of the Week

My favorite map of this last week has to be Brand New Subway. Not only does Brand New Subway let you create your very own New York subway system it also works out how many passengers your network would attract,

Brand New Subway allows you to tear up the New York transit map and start from scratch. You can build subway lines anywhere you like in the city and place subway stations where ever you want. As you create your new map Brand New Subway will even estimate how many passengers will use your map and how much each fare is likely to cost.

When you add a station to the map a number of data sources (census data, jobs data, existing transportation demand, etc.) are used to estimate the station's ridership. The same data is used to estimate the daily ridership on your whole new subway system.


Greece is home to around 57,000 refugees. Most of them now live in over 40 refugee camps dotted around the country. This American Life sent a team of architects and engineers to map and investigate life in a few of these camps.

Hockey & Baseball Refugees is an online documentary exploring the situation faced by refugees living in Greek refugee camps. These camps are housed in an abandoned beach resort, an Olympic baseball stadium, an air force base, a highway rest stop and the grounds of an old psychiatric hospital.

The Hockey & Baseball Refugees documentary uses a collection of aerial views, oblique views and architectural drawings to provide visual tours of the five featured camps. These visual representations of the camps are accompanied by photographs and videos documenting the conditions in the camps.


Earlier this year Mark Evans created a wonderful mapped visualization of commuting flows in the USA. These hypnotic animated maps show workers traveling to and from American cities. Mark has now created a similar visualization showing the commuting flows in English & Welsh cities.

Mark's new Commute Map of England & Wales replicates the U.S. map, only this time it shows where people commute from into towns and cities in the UK. Using the two drop-down menus above the map you can select a region and then an individual city or town.

After you select an individual location the map animates the commuting flow into the city in the morning and then the commuting flow as workers return home in the evening. The four locations where the most workers commute from are indicated by the colored moving dots on the map.