The Commuting Time Map

The CommuteTimeMap can show you how far you can live from your workplace in order to be able to commute to work within the time you would like to spend commuting. Enter your work (or place of study) address into this interactive map, submit your commuting travel time and an isochrone layer will show you all the areas which you can travel to and from within your commuting time. 

The CommuteTimeMap works for different methods of commuting. You can change your mode of transport for your commuting isochrone between public transport, car, cycling or walking. The isochrone layer showing how far you can travel will change depending on your chosen mode of transport.

At the present time a lot of people might not be in need of a map which shows how far you can commute within a certain time. However the map is still useful for those of us working for home. The CommuteTimeMap includes an option which allows you to view an isochrone layer for more than one address. So, for example, if you want to meet up with a friend outside you can enter both your addresses and see the areas which are within a 15 minute walk of both your homes. You can even ask the map to highlight just the areas which intersects both of your travel areas. 

You can view many more travel time maps by checking out the Maps Mania isochrone label.

Via: WeeklyOSM

The National Bushfire Map

The 2019-2020 bushfire season in Australia, was truly disastrous and is now referred to in Australia as Black Summer. Around 46,050,750 acres were burned during last year's bushfire season, over 9,000 buildings were destroyed, and nearly 500 people lost their lives.

In January of 2020 a new national bushfire map was released. Bushfire.io is an interactive map which uses data from a range of sources to provide a national view of wildfire events in Australia. The map shows current fire hotspots, road closures and information on the latest wind and weather. 

On the map current fire warnings are shown using markers and colored polygons. Locations with fire warnings are shown in red. If you select a warning shown on the map then you can read more detail on the alert level in place, evacuation details & addresses, news on road closures & conditions, and news on the fire-fighting response to the fire.The map also includes an animated wind layer which shows the latest wind conditions across the whole country.

If you register with Bushfire.io then you can receive push notifications and alerts about bushfire events near your home.

MyFireWatch is another interactive map providing information on the latest bushfires in Australia. This map uses data from remote sensing satellites and is updated every 2-4 hours, depending on the position of satellites. If you select a fire marker on the map you can read details on the time and date when the fire was last detected and its longitude and latitude.

MyFireWatch also includes an Incidents and Warnings section which provides information on the latest fire warnings issued in each state. 

Mapping US Vaccine Allocation

During the first phase of Operation Warp Speed the federal government distributed Covid-19 vaccines based on the total adult population of each state. Most states then used the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccines Work Group recommendations in deciding how those vaccines should then be allocated to their citizens. In Phase 1a the CDC advice was that priority should be given to health-care personnel and long-term care facility residents.

Mapping the New Politics of Care has released a new interactive map which helps to visualize how vaccines could have been allocated in counties during Vaccine Allocation Phase 1a. Using the map you can see how many vaccines each county could have been allocated by the state during phase 1a based on different distribution strategies.The map allows you to directly compare how two different distribution strategies would effect the number of vaccines distributed to each county in a state. 

The different strategies include a simple distribution based on the county's adult population, distribution based on the county's number of health-care personnel and long-term care facility residents, and distribution based on the county's Social Vulnerability Index (excluding the race / ethnicity variable). The numbers used by the map are based on the 22,578,375 doses of the vaccine which were distributed in the United States as of January 18th.

A survey conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi Lab suggests that more than 25% of Americans do not want to get vaccinated. If 1 in 4 people refuse to be vaccinated then the USA will struggle to ever escape from Covid-19 lock-downs.

While the survey is extremely worrying it is also helpful as it can help the CDC target where they need to target education campaigns. You can explore the results for yourself on an interactive map created from the data by MIT Technology Review. Do your neighbors want to get vaccinated? is a choropleth map which shows the percentage chance that a person in each county in the USA will want to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Bloomberg's Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker uses data gathered from government websites and public statements to map the progress of the Covid-19 vaccination around the world. The global map shows that countries in the northern hemisphere in general are progressing much faster in rolling out vaccination programs than countries in the southern hemisphere.

The Bloomberg Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker also includes an interactive map which shows the rate that individual states in the USA are administering the Covid-19 vaccination.

Covid-19 School Tracking Maps

The Canada COVID-19 School Tracker is an interactive map which is plotting COVID-19 outbreaks in schools across Canada. The map is designed to provide parents, communities and students with the information to make important decisions about school openings. 

In Canada decisions about school openings are being made at the province level. Unfortunately for parents and students information about Covid-19 cases in schools is not always readily available and some provinces are better than others in reporting outbreaks in schools.

The Canada Covid-19 School Tracker map shows schools which have reported cases of Covid-19. On the map individual schools are represented by colored markers. Yellow markers show where a school has reported individual unlinked cases of Covid-19. Red circles indicate where there have been outbreaks and purple circles show clusters. The size of the circles indicate the total number of reported cases in a school.

The map includes filters which allow you to adjust the schools shown by the number of cases and by date. You can therefore, for example,  use the 'days' filter to only show schools which have reported cases in the last two weeks.

In the UK the School Covid Map takes a different approach. Rather than map the number of Covid-19 cases reported in individual schools the UK School Covid Map shows the number of positive cases reported in the neighborhoods around schools. 

Currently in the UK most schools are closed except for the children of essential workers (e.g. the children of doctors and nurses). The National Education Union has released the School Covid Map to help provide information on whether it is safe to reopen school and colleges. 

The map shows the numbers of Covid-19 cases over the last week in the areas around individual schools and whether the trend in reported cases is rising or falling. The map also shows the watchlist status of the local authority and a link to any local restrictions that are in place.

Colonizing the Planets

One of the world's most popular interactive maps is the True Size Of ... , which is a fun tool for comparing the size of different countries by placing one country on top of another. The True Size Of ... is particularly useful for showing some of the size distortions which are inherent in the Mercator projection, for example by placing Greenland on top of the continent of Africa. 

One thing that the True Size Of ... isn't very good at is providing an inter-planetary scale. Obviously the most pressing question on most American's minds is how big is the United States compared to the planet Venus. Which is where Countries Mapped onto Solar System Bodies comes in. Countries Mapped onto Solar System Bodies is an invaluable tool for comparing the sizes of countries and continents to the planets and moons of our solar system.

Using the tool you can overlay the shape of any country on top of an interactive globe of any of this solar system's planets or moons. This is actually a very good way to visualize the size of the planets. Most people have a reasonable understanding of the scale of their country compared to the Earth. Projecting a country onto a planet provides a fantastic reference for judging the size of that planet using a scale that is very familiar to the user.

Boston's Favorite Streets

MIT's Sensable Lab has discovered a unique method to determine which streets are seen as the most desirable. By analyzing the routes taken by pedestrians to get from A to B Sensable Lab discovered that on average pedestrians chose to walk 10% further than the shortest route. 

So why do pedestrians  go out of their way when walking from A to B? They might deviate from the shortest route to avoid busy streets, to visit amenities & shops or to access green spaces. By working out which streets people are prepared to deviate to from their shortest route Sensable Labs can work out which which are people's most liked streets.

In Desirable Streets Sensable Labs has analyzed the deviations made by people in over 120,000 journeys in Boston, in order to work out which are the city's most desirable streets. They have published an interactive map which colors Boston's most desirable streets. From this map they have discovered that three main features characterize the most desirable streets. These are: 

1. access to parks
2. nearby shops & businesses 
3. sidewalks & street furniture.
   

Polygon Tweening

2020 was a record breaking year for wildfires in California. Four of last year's fires are in the largest six wildfires ever seen in California. These include the August Complex fire which was California's largest wildfire in history by some margin .

Reuters has created a very impressive data visualization to illustrate the devastating size of last year's fires in California. At the heart of The Age of the Megafire is a visual comparison of the size of California's largest historical wildfires. To achieve this comparison Reuters has created a series of animated tweens of the fires, morphing the polygon shapes of each fire into squares of the same sized area. Representing the size of the fires as separate squares allows the user to easily compare the size of California's historical wildfires. 

To show how wildfires in recent years have started to become significantly larger than fires from the past Reuters has included a 'wildfire race' visualization. This involves showing the largest ten fires chronologically by year. As the years pass the larger squares (of the more recent wildfires) start pushing out the smaller squares (representing the largest historical wildfires from previous years). 

At the heart of Reuter's visualization is the transition of geographical shapefiles into geometric squares. Achieving this can be very difficult. However if you want an easy-ish introduction into how you can create a similar effect you should have a look at Mike Bostock's Shape Tweening demo. This small demo shows you how to tween a polygon shape (from a json file) into a circle.In Mike's example the shapefile of the state of California tweens into a similar sized circle.

The Bendy Video Map

Both Mapbox and Leaflet.js include options which allow you to overlay videos on top of an interactive map. Mapbox's raster layers and Leaflet's L.VideoOverlay class both make it very easy to add playable videos on top of the satellite imagery (or road map) of the location shown in the video. This is particularly useful if you want to add animated timelapse satellite images or show drone captured video on a map.

Now that Mapbox has the option to Add 3D Terrain to the Map you can now also drape a video layer over a curved 3D terrain.For example this Lombard Street Video Map overlays drone captured video of cars driving on San Francisco's most famous winding street. Because the map also uses Mapbox's 3D terrain when you adjust the 'pitch' of the map the video twists and bends to fit the underlying height of the sloping street. 

The Lombard Street Video Map is just one of a number of fun and interesting experimental maps which have been made with Mapbox's new 3D elevation data. You might also like: 

• 3D Stereoscopic Anaglyph and Crossview Map  
• Vintage Mapper
  
• Joy Plots in 3D
  
• 3D Map of the Golden Gate Bridge

Mapping Cubism

I am a huge fan of Jason Farago's art criticism for the New York Times. His close readings of famous works of art are illustrated with interactive scrollytelling paintings. Farago's critiques owe a lot to the navigation and presentation techniques developed for online interactive maps. As you progress through one of his close readings the interactive painting zooms and pans to illustrate Farago's observations of the artist's work.

Farago's previous critiques of individual paintings include:

• Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
• Albrecht Dürer's Self Portrait
  
• Thomas Eakins' painting The Gross Clinic
  
• Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe

In his latest article for the New York Times Farago looks at the work of Cubist artist Juan Gris' "Still Life: The Table". In An Art Revolution, Made With Scissors and Glue Farago explores Gris' use of collage to create a new form of painting. As well as the close reading of Gris' Still Life collage the essay explores the influence of works of art by Cezanne and the sculptures of African artists on the Cubist movement. 

If you are familiar with the Leaflet.js mapping library then you can create your own interactive painting critiques - using image tiles from paintings instead of map tiles. Museums and art galleries around the world use the iiif format to present artworks as zoomable images. This means that for many works of art, if they have a iiif manifest, you don't even have to create the image tiles for yourself.

The fantastic leaflet-iiif plugin allows you to seamlessly use iiif manifests with the Leaflet mapping platform.This means that you can quickly turn any painting with a iiif manifest into an interactive Leaflet map. You can view a demo of this in action on my own The Drawing Lesson critique. In this scrollytelling examination of Jan Steen's painting (depicting an artist teaching two young pupils how to draw) I have used the Leaflet mapping library to take a close look at Steen's 17th century Dutch masterpiece. 

You can explore how my critique of the Drawing Lesson works by exploring the JavaScript code on its Glitch page. You can even clone the page if you want and use the page as a template for creating your own interactive scrollytelling painting essay.

The Healthy Streets Index

University College London (UCL) has released a new interactive map which rates London's streets based on how 'healthy' they are. The Healthy Streets Index ranks every single street in Central London based on ten different indicators. 

The map reveals that some London boroughs have a much higher proportion of healthy streets than other boroughs. According to the index Camden has some of London's healthiest streets. One in five of the borough's streets are in the top 5% of London's Healthy Streets Index. The borough of Hillingdon, on the other hand, has a lot of unhealthy streets. One in 14 of the borough's streets are in the bottom 5% of London streets.

The ten key indicators which have been used to determine the health of individual streets are designed to measure the appeal of streets for walking, cycling and spending time in. They measure environmental factors such as noise, air quality, the volume of road traffic, tree cover, accessibility to public transit and land use. The Healthy Streets Index interactive map visualizes the score given to each street using different colors. The roads colored red have a low index rank and green roads have a high index rank (there are alternate blue-yellow maps available as static downloads).

At the moment the Healthy Streets Index only has available an interactive map showing the health of London's streets. However UCL are currently working on adding maps of other UK and international cities to the Healthy Streets Index.