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On Monday I reviewed two animated maps that simulate one day's worth of train travel in countries across the world. Both of these simulations used conventional geographic maps, with the trains shown in their real-world geographical locations. But wouldn't it be cool to see this data animated on a proper schematic transit map? I Love Trains does exactly that. It is a simulation of an entire day's…
Here's a little thing I discovered about Chicago: the higher a street's number, the further south it is from the city center. You can see this very clearly on North America's Numbered Streets . This interactive map colors " all streets with a '#st', '#nd', '#rd', or '#th' in their name in North America, as drawn from OpenStreetMap. " Zoom in on a city on North America's Numbered Streets and, if it…
Have you ever wanted to play GTA in San Francisco? In San Francisco - The Game , you can now drive cars, climb buildings or even hang-glide over the Bay Area - all in your browser. What makes this game world particularly interesting from a mapping perspective is that this isn't a fictional city inspired by San Francisco. The game's 3D world is built from real-world photogrammetry and elevation…
One Day on Rails maps more than 70,000 train journeys across Europe during one single day this summer. It also maps 5,737 journeys across the USA, 34,206 journeys in Tokyo and 11,075 journeys in London. One Day On Rails visualizes an entire day's railway activity on one single animated interactive map. Rather than showing trains at a single point in time, One Day on Rails uses real timetable data…
One of the most memorable scenes in Inception sees Leonardo DiCaprio's character walking through Paris as the city appears to fold in on itself, with entire streets rising from the ground and bending over the characters below. The surreal effect makes the city seem like a three-dimensional model that can be manipulated like a sheet of paper. Orbify is exploring whether something inspired by this…
DrillerDB Underground is very different from a conventional map, which presents the Earth's surface as a flat 2D view from directly above. Instead, it offers a striking oblique 3D view where the surface of the earth has been sliced open like a layer cake. Rising above the horizon is standard aerial imagery draped over USGS 3DEP elevation data, but the real star of this map lies directly…
Anyone who has ever flown from America to Europe has probably noticed that the outward flight usually takes considerably less time than the return journey. The reason is the jet stream - fast-moving winds high in the atmosphere that generally blow from west to east. Flying east, aircraft can get a significant push from these winds, while flying west means battling against them. The same phenomenon…
SmokyMountains.com has been producing its fall foliage maps for more than a decade. The Smoky Mountains 2026 Fall Foliage Prediction Map has now been released to visualize this year's expected progression of fall foliage across the contiguous US. Rather than simply highlighting where autumn is happening now, the interactive map lets you travel through the season week by week to see when different…
Spain's 2026 World Cup win was hardly a massive surprise to football fans. It was another chapter in what has become an extraordinary period of Spanish dominance in international football. Spain won the European Championship in 2024 and the Nations League in 2023, and the Spanish women are the current World Cup holders. They also came agonisingly close to adding the 2025 Women's European…
What would the world look like if countries were resized according to the number of people living in them? You can explore that question in Gapmover , an map that shows how the relative size of countries has changed from 1800 and is projected to change through to 2100. Unlike a conventional map, this animated population cartogram continually distorts the shapes and sizes of countries so that their…
If you want to take a trip through the history of Richmond, Virginia, Yesterdays is a wonderful place to start. This interactive map brings together thousands of historical photographs and pins them to the places where they were taken. You can simply browse the map and see what photographs have been recorded in different parts of Richmond, or search the collection by date, subject and other data.…
One of the perennial questions in UK politics and geography is “ where is the border between the North and South? ” I can now definitively answer that question thanks to MapSplit. Giuseppe Sollazzo’s MapSplit interactive map allows you to map any UK-specific dataset and then “draw a movable straight line across the UK” to view a statistic for each side. This means I was able to upload all the…
If you want to discover the best spots nearby to watch the sunset, then you need the Sunset Atlas . Choosing a good local spot to watch the sun disappear below the horizon can involve a fair amount of trial and error. Sunset Atlas takes some of the guesswork out of finding the perfect sunset viewpoint by mapping sunset viewing conditions across Europe. The interactive map uses a colourful heatmap…
tokyo-trains It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a city in possession of a good railway network, must be in want of an animated train map. Yet, having once beheld the grandeur of Mini Tokyo 3D and the intricate labyrinth of the Shinjuku Station Indoor , one might reasonably despair of any further elegance in the art. Mr. Gregg Tavares, however, was of a different mind entirely. Reader, he…
Last week Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the Moon. You can view its estimated impact site on azmth Luna , an interactive 3D map of our nearest neighbour. Enter “Falcon 9” into the map's search box and the crash site is highlighted on the lunar surface, near the Einstein crater on the Moon's western limb. The Falcon 9 crash is just one of 44 landing and impact sites mapped by azmth…
The American population is moving south and west. You can see that migration writ large in the US Population Growth Atlas , an interactive map showing how the populations of every US county and state have changed between 1980 and 2025. The most striking feature of the map is the broad band of population decline running through the middle of the country. From the Dakotas and Montana, south through…
