The Geotagger's World Atlas

Eric Fischer's Flickr photostream has lots of interesting maps. He has put together The Geotagger's World Atlas, a series of maps showing the locations of geotagged images from Flickr and Picasa. These maps (all covering 15 square miles) reveal the contrasting patterns of world cities from the highly centralized European cities such as Amsterdam, to the sprawling multinodal Los Angeles.

   

To add color and interest, he also has a set called Locals and Tourists with color coded dots - blue for locals red for tourists and yellow for not certain. Most cities have the red dots in the central areas and clustered at beaches, sports arenas and amusement parks. San Francisco (his hometown?) has a nice concentration of red all along the Golden Gate Bridge and red clusters in various tourist destinations, including Alcatraz.



The lines in these maps connect pictures that were taken in a series.

Paris shows an east-west split. The red area at the lower left edge is probably Versailles.



The Asian cities show some surprisingly spread out settlement patterns. Here is Taipei.

I'll finish off with Tokyo and its nice, artistic pattern.

Velib!-Bicycle Month, Part Deux.

Paris is the envy of the bicycling world with its very successful bike share program, Velib'. The program is self service and allows the user to pick up a bike at any "service point" and drop it off anywhere else. The service points (stations) are available 24 hours/7 days a week and are spaced 300 meters apart. The purple icons represent stations. Each station has about 20 bike stands and a card reader to allow the user to access the bikes.

The maps illustrate how well the stations cover the city. Are all maps of Paris are required to show pictograms of the monuments?




This detailed section shows that even the edges of the city are well covered.




I have not been to Paris since they implemented this program but it looks like fun and its success has spawned imitations throughout Europe. Even some US cities are considering the program.
I like these zoomed way out google map views from their station finder. They illustrate the density and reach of the program.





La ville est plus belle a velo!

Map of the Week - Paris circa 1900

My wife gave me a "Vintage Maps" 2009 calendar as a Chanukah gift. This is the April map. Speaking in highly technical cartographic terms, I love the cool monuments as well as the details of woods, parks, forts and city walls. I stare at this map way too much at work and don't get other things done.
It is odd that no map credits are given in this calendar. There is just a title; "Paris Circa 1900". I usually like to have a link or give credit for the maps I post but in this case I must defer to the calendar's publisher Cavallini & Co.


Here is a detail of part of Central Paris for your viewing pleasure.