Hoboken's Corner Cars

Hoboken, New Jersey, the hometown of the overrated Frank Sinatra and way underrated Yo La Tengo has stepped to the forefront of urban transportation policy with the introduction of Corner Cars.  The program is a partnership between the city and Hertz. Like any other densely populated area, the city has a major parking problem. By placing 50 rental cars around the city they hope to remove over 750 cars from the streets. Here is a map showing the location of the first group of cars.

The cars are placed so that 90% of the city's population live within a five minute walk of a car as illustrated by the map below. They have assigned spaces so you know where to find them and where to park when you're finished.

If you choose to use the local bus service instead the city also provides you with a map showing the live bus locations.

Now what's your excuse for keeping your car? You probably don't live in Hoboken, that's what.

Map of the Week-Britain Travel Time Maps

My Society has produced some nice travel time maps for Great Britain that you can see here. I particularly like this one comparing travel time by car and train from Cambridge. The red areas are quicker by train, orange is about the same and then yellow to green to blue gets gradually faster by car.

A couple of disclaimers about this map from their site:
"the road travel model takes no account of traffic or urban areas, so it is pessimistic about the time saving"
"However, the model of car journey times is very simplistic, so these results should not be taken too seriously—we hope to extend the work with a more realistic model of driving times, which may substantially change the comparative results."

Map of the Week 119-Swedish Meatballs on String

The thing below is a map of sorts. Not the prettiest thing you'll ever see and only "waguely" understandable. Still it would be cool to see it as a 3D model so you could look from all angles and see all the different connections. I forget where I originally found it but it's posted on Flickr. If you click it it will tell you in the title that it shows "Road Traffic" between Swedish counties, however a reading of the text below indicates that it is actually showing the tonnage of goods transported. You will also get some more info and the author (Arenamontanus).
Not knowing my Swedish counties as well as a geographer should I downloaded the county map below right from World Atlas. Note that there is at least one mistake on the county map - Dalarna County is labeled Kopparberg which is actually a town located in adjacent Orebro County.




Realizing that this blog layout doesn't lend itself to looking at these maps side by side I took the liberty of making my own image to compare the two maps - Click below to get a larger image - if that helps any.

MOTW #86

I've wanted to actually do a timely map of a newsworthy event for a while now so here are two maps from yesterdays horrible bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The first was taken from MinnDOT via wikipedia. The diagram map is from CNN.

MOTW #37

Live Road Conditions! Many states do this now. New York just updated theirs to a Google Maps base.