Street Level Views on Google

Google released a new feature today: Street level views in some locations. If you go to Google Maps and zoom into Denver, Chicago, New York, or a bunch of other cities, you'll see a button at the top for Street Level Views. Basically, you can walk down any street in downtown Denver, seeing the street trees, storefronts, with street names layed over the top of it. It's definitely worth a test drive.

Incidentally, the company that provided the imagery, which was collected while driving a truck equipped with a 12-sided video camera capturing a spherical, georeferenced viewpoint, licensed the technology to the military before this new partnership with Google. See the press release here.

Good stuff for map nerds.

Transportation Experimentation

It turns out that the collapse of a freeway in San Francisco has been an ideal opportunity for planners to study transportation patterns and develop different conclusions from the same data.

Conclusion A: People haven't had too much trouble, mainly because the interstate system wasn't that congested to begin with, and there are (thankfully) lots of other highways and alternative routes in the Bay Area.

Conclusion B: People haven't had too much trouble, mainly because they've switched to public transit in huge numbers. A reduction in the number of cars by 10% can bring a drastic reduction in congestion. (via Planetizen)

Maps as Art

Map of the Sacramento River, weaved into Airport Carpet

Smart Shrinkage

Youngstown, Ohio (where we've done a bit of work) is dealing with a backwards, bizarro problem: trying to plan out how to best shrink the size of their city, emptying out old neighborhoods and converting them to green space.

Link

via Planetizen