Eyes on the Street… All of Them

NYC Blog directs our attention to the map above, which depicts every street in the continental U.S. Map creator Ben Fry (no relation) posts a larger version on his site, and explains it like so:

All 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) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land.

  • Larry Littlefield

    You know what would be great? An inventory of the square footage of public right of way in NYC, with the amount used for sidewalks, moving lanes, parking planes, other purposes (planted medians, etc).

  • Nemo

    Amazing… I can actually pick out Osage County, autonomous region of the Osage Nation, next to where I grew up in Oklahoma.

  • impervious hardscape

    Fascinating.
    from the new Sustainable Streets plan:
    http://nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/stratplan.shtml

    “DOT is responsible for maintaining over 19,000 lane miles of roadway throughout the five boroughs of New York. Laid end to end, our roads would nearly circle the equator.” (“Delivering outstanding roadways, bridges and ferries” section)

    Thank gosh NYC DOT realizes that our city’s 19,000 lane miles cause flooding and exacerbate stormwater runoff.

    In the “Greening the Department From Top to Bottom” section, they include a number of measures to “better manage storm water run-off from streets.”

    – Coordinate with DEP to create streets that detain a maximum volume of storm water.
    – Increase the use of permeable surfaces and porous pavements to decrease runoff.
    – Capture more stormwater through the Greenstreets program with Parks Dept.
    – Allow for connected tree pits to provide better surface drainage.
    – Increase capacity for curb replacement and curb openings to increase storm water capture.

  • I’ll post the same information to my blog, thanks for
    ideas and great article.

  • I wanna find more info about this, anybody could?

  • Ian Turner

    Amazing how clearly you can see the Indian reservations.

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