Roads

CSAA Getting Out of the Paper Map Business
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the California State Automobile Association, one of only two regional auto associations still producing their own paper maps, is getting out of paper map publishing by the end of the year. Maps of northern… »
Posted on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 12:57 PM
Categories: Roads
All Streets
This is lovely: All Streets by Ben Fry, a data visualization of “[a]ll of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features)… »
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Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 7:04 PM
Categories: Roads
Review: Canada Back Road Atlas
Canada Back Road Atlas MapArt, 2007. Paperback, 702 pp. ISBN-13 978-1-55368-614-9 MapArt is easily the largest publisher of road maps in Canada, publishing not only maps of cities and metropolitan areas (both as folded maps and as coil-bound and saddle-stitched… »
Posted on Friday, February 15, 2008 at 11:12 PM
Categories: Book Reviews, Roads
Roads Renamed as Streets
Street names are becoming a source of confusion in rapidly growing Visalia, California: as the city expands, street suffixes change from rural “roads” to urban “streets,” “avenues” and “boulevards” in conformance with Visalia’s conventions. Which leads, as you might expect,… »
Posted on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 8:51 AM
Categories: Roads
Street View: City Updates and Its 1907 Equivalent
Four more cities in Google Maps Street View: Houston, Orlando, Los Angeles and San Diego. Cute: Google Maps Street View Circa 1907 — or, rather, a sample of Rand McNally’s photo auto-maps, which apparently predated road maps…. »
Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 5:31 PM
Categories: Cities, Houston, Los Angeles, Online Maps, Roads
Illinois Official Highway Map
Free, official road maps seem to be an endangered species. Via MAPS-L, a press release from Illinois’s Department of Transportation announcing that, for the second year running, their Official Highway Map would be available free of charge thanks to… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 10:12 PM
Categories: Roads
Google Maps Street View
The big news so far from Where 2.0 is the announcement of Google’s street-level imagery for five U.S. cities — Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and (of course) San Francisco — which, in a fit of originality, they’re… »
Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 4:28 PM
Categories: Cities, New York, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco, Video
MacArthur Maze vs. U.S. Route 90
Some more material about updating road data after disasters that I missed the first time around (and am only getting to now). Via Mapping Hacks, a San Francisco Chronicle article that discussed updating driving directions in the wake of… »
Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 5:03 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Hurricanes 2005, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco
RMCA 2007 Map Expo
The Road Map Collectors Association’s 2007 annual meeting and map expo will take place September 21-22 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Few details available as yet, but, they say, “We expect to have displays of rare Texas maps, courtesy of… »
Posted on Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 8:42 PM
Categories: Conferences, Groups & Societies, Roads
How Online Maps Update Their Data After Major Road Closures
This week has revealed a lot about how the online mapping sites respond to disasters that close major routes and affect driving directions. Within two days of the MacArthur Maze freeway collapse in Oakland, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MapQuest… »
Posted on Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 8:28 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco, Seattle
The Evolution of Michigan Road Maps
Footpaths to Freeways: The Evolution of Michigan Road Maps is an exhibition now on display (until June) on the fourth floor of the west wing of Michigan State University’s Main Library; if you can’t visit, there is this online… »
Posted on Friday, March 16, 2007 at 8:27 AM
Categories: Antique Maps, Exhibitions, Roads
Interstate Highway Diagram
Chris Yates has created a Beck-style diagram of the Interstate highway network — simplified, of course, so not every highway is listed. Interesting to see how the grid works: this is something my younger self, armed with an out-of-date… »
Posted on Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 6:52 AM
Categories: Roads
Jughandles and Other Unconventional Intersections
I’m sure you’ll forgive me a brief digression into road geekery. In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an article about how MapQuest et al. fail to display regionally unique intersection geometries, such as frontage roads, jughandles (at right),… »
Posted on Monday, February 5, 2007 at 8:04 AM
Categories: Roads
Collecting Road Maps: Richard Horwitz
Though I don’t collect them per se, I’ve always been a big fan of old road maps, so I enjoyed reading Ephemera’s interview with Richard Horwitz — he’s a past president of the Road Map Collectors Association, he owns… »
Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 at 6:06 PM
Categories: Collecting, Roads
Cartographies of Travel and Navigation
A new book from the University of Chicago Press looks interesting: Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, edited by James R. Akerman, a collection of essays about the history of all kinds of transportation-related maps — railroads, roads, nautical and… »
Posted on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 at 12:51 PM
Categories: Aviation, Books, Nautical, Railroads, Roads
Petroliana: The New York Times on Old Road Maps
An article in yesterday’s New York Times about collecting old road maps and other assorted gas-station paraphernalia — “petroliana.” Profiles John Margolies, the co-author of Hitting the Road: The Art of the American Road Map, who gave a recent presentation… »
Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 at 8:52 AM
Categories: Collecting, Roads
Rand McNally Turns 150
The Associated Press’s Dave Carpenter takes a look at map publisher Rand McNally on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, looking back on its history and at its future challenges (especially in re digital mapping). “[F]ollowing two ownership changes… »
Posted on Monday, October 16, 2006 at 11:06 AM
Categories: Publishers, Roads
AZ Republic: ‘Mapmaker’s Work Outdated by Time It’s Printed’
Another story about growth outpacing mapmaking, as the Arizona Republic looks at the Phoenix Metropolitan Street Atlas, published by local map store Wide World of Maps, and its cartographer, Bob Cournoyer, who has to deal with an average of 4,000… »
Posted on Friday, July 28, 2006 at 8:21 AM
Categories: Roads, Surveying
Thomas Guides, Navteq on KPCC
On Friday the 7th, there was an item on mapping on Patt Morrison’s afternoon show on 89.3 KPCC, a public radio station based in Pasadena, California. On deck were representatives from Thomas Brothers Maps and Navteq; much of the focus… »
Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at 12:24 AM
Categories: Mapping Errors, Podcasts & Audio, Publishers, Roads, Surveying
Caught Mapping (1940)
Caught Mapping is a nine-minute film, made in 1940, about how the road maps of the time were made — and, more importantly, revised, with a fair bit on field surveyors. I was surprised that the film reported that… »
Posted on Tuesday, July 4, 2006 at 10:50 PM
Categories: Roads, Surveying, Video
Approving Street Names
This really doesn’t have anything to do with maps per se, but I think you’ll be interested in it anyway. Last week’s Los Angeles Times had a profile of John Trichak, whose job it is to approve all the proposed… »
Posted on Monday, June 19, 2006 at 7:26 PM
Categories: Roads
Mapmaker Fined for Infringing Sherlock’s Copyright
A Calgary mapmaker has been fined C$8,000 for making a cheap knock-off of a competitor’s city atlas. The judge ruled that Commodore Allen’s AMI Calgary Street Atlas infringed the copyright of Sherlock Publishing’s atlas of Calgary, saying that the differences… »
Posted on Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 9:33 AM
Categories: Cities, Copyright, Publishers, Roads
The New Yorker on Road Maps and Directions
This week’s New Yorker has a long article by Nick Paumgarten on mapping, the principal focus of which is driving directions, but which has lots of little digressions into cognate areas like road maps (and their history) and digital mapping… »
Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006 at 9:46 AM
Categories: Driving Directions, Roads, Surveying
Yahoo! Directions on an iPod
iPods have been used for subway maps before (see previous entries: 1, 2, 3); now this site generates driving directions from Yahoo! Maps that can be exported to a photo-capable (i.e., colour-screen) iPod. Via Scoble…. »
Posted on Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 3:01 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Mobile Devices, Online Maps, Roads
A Brief History of Rand McNally
Samuel John Klein’s Brief History of Rand McNally is up on Designorati today. Interesting to see that William Rand and Andrew McNally started with railroads (road travel was some decades away); their first map, in 1872, was the Railway Guide…. »
Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 12:19 PM
Categories: Publishers, Roads
Petrol Maps
I like old road maps, and I’m apparently not alone. Ian Byrne’s Petrol Maps is one of several web sites dedicated to collecting and documenting old road maps; this one looks at maps of Europe issued by oil companies. Via… »
Posted on Monday, October 24, 2005 at 8:29 AM
Categories: Roads
Decline of the Road Map
This article, which appeared in Friday’s Vancouver Sun, offers a paean to old highways maps and bemoans — but does not provide concrete examples of — their modern-day equivalents: “[T]oday’s pale spectres provide us with little more than stock photographs,… »
Posted on Monday, October 17, 2005 at 6:52 AM
Categories: Roads
LA Times: Maps Outpaced by Suburban Growth
From today’s edition of the LA Times, a story about how maps can’t keep up with the pace of suburban growth in fast-growing areas like California, Nevada and Arizona. Some of those areas add thousands of new streets a year…. »
Posted on Sunday, August 21, 2005 at 11:05 AM
Categories: Cities, Online Maps, Roads, Surveying
Art of the Road
Roadmap Art of the Road is a Flickr group that shares “scanned images from vintage roadmaps from gas stations, municipalities and the like.” The focus is on the cover art, not the cartography, but it’s still of interest. See previous… »
Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2005 at 8:58 AM
Categories: Art, Groups & Societies, Roads
More Road Maps
More scans of old maps — the covers only, alas — at a site that looks like it was just getting started — back in 1998 — and stayed there (via Things Magazine)…. »
Posted on Thursday, April 29, 2004 at 9:26 AM
Categories: Art, Roads
Early Highway Maps
I’m a sucker for road maps, so I think I’ve saved the best of Plep’s three links to various Osher Map Library pages for last: an exhibition of early highway maps, called Road Maps: The American Way, that took place… »
Posted on Thursday, April 22, 2004 at 10:36 AM
Categories: Exhibitions, Roads

Note: Entries from 2003 were not categorized and will not appear in the category archives. Please consult the monthly archives.