High Speed Rail Destinations

China now has over 16,000 miles of high-speed rail-lines. Trains can travel on these high-speed lines at over 200 mph. It is the world's largest and most used high-speed rail network. Places High-Speed Rail Can Take You is an interactive map of China's growing high-speed rail network. The map is designed to show you where you can travel to by high-speed train from any Chinese city.

If you select a city on the map you can view all the destinations you can reach using the high speed train network within 3, 4, 5 or 6 hours journey time from your selected city. It is a great way for passengers to see the destinations available to them within a set time.

If you select a station on the map or select it from the drop-down menu the map will show you all the high-speed rail lines from that city. The lines are colored on the map to show the travel times to different destinations. Where the line is yellow the train can arrive there in 3 hours, orange equals 4 hours, pink is 5 hours and purple is 6.

How Segregated is Your Town?

This week the Washington Post released an impressive interactive map revealing the level of segregation in American towns and cities. The Segregation Map is a huge dot map of the United States, visualizing the ethnic breakdown of the American population. The Washington Post aren't alone in worrying about the level of segregation in American cities. The Anti-Discrimination Center has also this week released a series of interactive maps exploring the segregated neighborhoods of American cities.

In Segregated, really segregated, or ultra-segregated? the Anti-Discrimination Center has created three interactive maps which show the current level of integration in American neighborhoods. The initial map of the three shows the largest ethnic group in each state, county, or census tract area. The second map shows the percentage of the African-American population in each area and the third map shows the percentage of Hispanic or Latino population in each area.

On both the African-American and Hispanic or Latino maps you can click on the colors representing a percentage block (in the map legend) to highlight those areas corresponding to that range. You can also see whether your neighborhood has become more or less integrated over the last six years by switching between the Census 2010 and the American Community Survey 2016 views.

European Building Heights

Europe's earth observation programme Copernicus has released building height data for all of Europe's major cities. Using the Urban Atlas interactive map you can view and download the building data for the capital cities of all 31 countries in the European Union and European Free Trade Association.

The building heights data on the interactive map consists of a 10 m x 10 m resolution raster layer. The building heights were derived from stereo images from Cartosat-1, a stereoscopic Earth observation satellite and the data comes from the reference year 2012. You can download the building data for each capital city in ESRI shapefile format.

One quick observation I made with the map is noticing how only a relatively small area of central London has tall buildings, especially compared with other European cities like Paris. Londoners  on the whole appear to like living in two story houses rather than in apartment buildings. They also like to moan about the lack of affordable housing.

The Diverse But Segregated States of America

The United States of America is becoming more and more diverse. It is also remains stubbornly segregated. According to the Washington Post most urban neighborhoods are becoming less segregated. Nevertheless many cities remain strongly segregated.

The Post has used data from the US census and from the 2016 five-year American Community Survey to map out where different ethnic groups live in American cities. The Segregation Map includes multiple small maps showing the diversity in a number of American cities. It also features a Mapbox based interactive map which allows you to explore the diversity of any American location.

The huge interactive dot map includes data for 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2016. This allows you to zoom-in on your town neighborhood to see whether it is becoming more diverse or more segregated. You might get a better idea of local trends in diversity by switching the map to the 'Diversity' view. This changes the map to a choropleth view showing the amount of diversity in each neighborhood. Purple colored areas are more segregated and green areas are more diverse.

Greggs vs Starbucks

Most geographical disputes in the UK are solved by closely examining the distribution of the national chain of Greggs bakeries. For those of you who didn't grow up in the warm embrace of Northern England Greggs is the largest bakery chain in the United Kingdom. It is loved by many for its sausage rolls, cheap sandwiches and sweet cakes.

Last year the Tab worked out Where the North is by plotting every single Greggs store on a map. By plotting the location of all 1,823 Greggs bakeries throughout the UK the Tab were able to finally determine beyond debate where the south finishes and the north begins. It is possible to determine if a location is in the north or south of England by looking at the number of people per each Greggs bakery. 25,000 people per each Greggs bakery is the Tab's benchmark. If a town has less than 25,000 inhabitants per Greggs then it is in in the north. More than that and the town is in the south.

The number of Greggs restaurants can also be used to determine how deprived an area is. In Greggs vs Starbucks Compared Esri has used the numbers of Starbuck coffee shops and Greggs bakeries to determine which areas of the UK are more gentrified and in which areas you would struggle to find avocado toast.

The map reveals the predominance of Greggs or Starbucks in each postcode area in the UK. It continues the great tradition of UK social-class obsessed mapping which brought us such seminal maps as How to know if where you live is “up and coming” (which compares the number of coffee & fried chicken shops to determine gentrification) and Fast Food England (which used the density of fast food restaurants to determine which areas of the UK you can comfortably sneer at).

Destruction is Coming

A new interactive map has got Guns and Roses fans excited. GNR.fm features a Mapbox map of the world. On top of the map is an animation flicking through the five skulls from the cover of the Guns and Roses album 'Appetite for Destruction'.

If you visit the website on a mobile devise you are asked to choose one of the five skulls and share your location with the map. The map also features a countdown clock which will reach zero in 1 day and 12 hours (at the time of writing). There is a lot of speculation among fans about what the map and countdown represent. Presumably we don't have long to find out.


While you are waiting for destruction to arrive why not play Expedia's World of Music Quiz? Expedia's map quiz with a difference tests how well you know your rock bands with geographically inspired names.

The American rock band Chicago were formed in Chicago. That might sound obvious but it turns out that most music artists with geographical names don't actually have any geographical connections with the places that they are named for. Expedia's World of Music quiz asks you to identify the home locations of music artists with geographical based names. In the quiz you are played a series of songs by various bands. Your task is to click on the map to show where you think the band hails from (and not where their name suggests).

Mapping the Frenzy of Orlando

Ludovico Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso' is an epic 16th century poem. The poem is set in a time of war between the Christians and Saracens and involves journeys around the known world (and to the moon). As well as the eponymous hero Orlando the poem features a wide cast of colorful characters, including sorcerers, a gigantic sea monster and a flying horse.

The Orlando Furioso Atlas is busy mapping the journeys in each of the epic poem's forty-six cantos. The character journeys in each of the cantos are shown on top of Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia map of 1507. The use of this contemporaneous map helps to evoke the world as it was conceived at the time when Orlando Furioso was written. Each character's journey is shown with a distinct colored line on the map.

If you click on any point on a journey line on the map you will be taken to the corresponding text of the poem in the sidebar. Conversely, if you click on the highlighted text in the poem, the corresponding location will be highlighted on the map.

Overcrowded America

One of the consequences of the affordable housing shortage is that many people are having to share apartments with more people than the buildings were designed to accommodate. The LA Times used data from the American Community Survey, spanning 2008 to 2012, to map where in the USA people are living in crowded homes. A home was considered crowded if it housed more than one person per room.

Using the LA Times' interactive map you can search any town or city in the United States to view the percentage of over crowded homes in each zip-code area. Mapping the Country's Crowded Homes reveals that Southern California has 134 crowded zip-codes. The scaled markers on the map show the percentage of homes in each neighborhood with crowded homes which are overcrowded. If you hover over one of these markers you can discover how many housing units are overcrowded and how the zip-code area ranks compared to the rest of the USA.

Who Will Win the Midterms?

The 2018 Midterm Elections are now only half a year away. G. Elliott Morris of the Crosstab has released his forecast map for the 2018 midterm elections to the House of Representatives. Crosstab's forecast is based on an average of opinion polls, a forecast of the polls on polling day and simulations of the election.

The 2018 Midterm Elections Forecast interactive election map shows the chance each House seat has of being won by either the Republicans or Democrats. The map also highlights all the seats that the Crosstab forecast predicts will flip in the election. If you hover over a seat on the map you can view the chance of winning that each party has in the seat using Crosstab's forecast.


If you don't like the results shown on the map then tough you can use 270 to Win's interactive map to change the results. Their 2018 House Election Interactive Map starts (with this link) with Crosstab's data. However you can click on any seat in the 270 to Win map to change the result shown.

3D Map Games

For some reason all the online mapping companies seem desperate to become computer gaming platforms. Mapbox has released the Mapbox Unity SDK and Google is also keen for people to use the Google Maps API with Unity.

These mapping SDK's for Unity are designed to help game developers build games based on real world locations. But why bother with Unity when you can just create fun games with Cesium.js?


GeoStrike is a multiplayer 3D shooting game. The game uses the Cesium.js 3d mapping library to create a game world which is georeferenced to the real world. The game is really easy to play. Just choose a character, enter your character name and you are then dropped into the game world. Now all you have to do is track down and shoot the other players from around the world.


Soarer is a very simple flight game which uses Cesium.js to allow you to explore the world from the air. In truth there isn't much of a game element to Soarer. In effect it just provides you with a few keyboard controls which allow you to explore Cesium's 3d world as if you were flying a plane.


GeoFS is a proper full-scale Cesium.js flight simulator. The game allows you to take control of a number of different aircraft, many of them with realistic cockpits. GeoFS is also a multi-player game so as well as fighting to control your own aircraft you can see and chat with other players in the game.