The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been

The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been by Jake Berman

This book is a very depressing look at transit in North America. Most places had decent transit at one time, then had it wiped out in favor of cars. There had been various attempts at implementing good transit that have fallen apart. Much of the newer transit in the United States has been overpriced and of minimal utility. (Many are described with limited attractions or places that could be more easily walked.) There have been a few successful modern transit systems. Canada has generally done a good job. Houston of all places has followed best practices by sending transit to dense areas and allowing dense development to be located there. (Dallas has done the opposite, making for a much less useful transit system.)

Transit systems have failed for various reasons. Economic collapses and wars have eliminated funding. Investors and the mob have driven others down. Though most come down to various politics. The government was covering 90% of the cost of freeways, so government loved the gravy train at the expense of transit investment. Then the negatives of freeway construction has lead to excessive government approval process. City/Suburb conflicts make it difficult to get consensus on regional transit support. Past transit monopolies and extortion soured the public view on supporting transit. 

The book includes map of the original transit systems, proposals that were not built and the current systems. It can be quite depressing to look at all those details. There are so many "modern" transit systems that have too much focus on political appeasement and parking and not enough on making walkable communities.

Maphead

I love maps. I have a large collection of paper maps sitting around the house. Bike maps, transit maps, National Geographic maps and more. My dream job was to work at Google Maps. (When my interviewers there turned out to be in the internal tools department, rather than maps, I decided to look elsewhere.) I would often go on long bike rides just so I could come home and spend hours staring at the map, trying to figure out where I went.

Maphead seemed like the book for me and it didn't disappoint. Ken "Jeopardy champion" Jennings starts with a pretty straightforward story of maps and the people that love them. Paper maps have that allure that you still can't get from online mapping programs. We also get a history of maps with many anecdotes and bits of trivia thrown in.

Then the book starts to venture out towards other types of "geography geeks". We get the academic geographers (who often disparage "mere maps"). We also get the (mostly male Indian) kids in the geography bee. There are people who spend hours following a "trail" on a map, geocachers, fantasy mappers and other "geography obsessed". (We have people that visit the highest point in every state, integer latitude/longitudes, 100s of countries and so forth.) Some people are even obsessed with taking pictures of all highway signs. He even uses the book as an excuse to visit Rand McNalley headquarters in Skokie. (That was another place I would have liked to work. I'm surprised he didn't head out to Delorme in Maine.)

The writing is entertaining, and the subject matter is both nostalgic and informative. Am I an oddball who loves maps, but does not have great spacial skills? What will things be like when the GPS generation grows up? (Could we control the world just by hacking GPS navigation devices.) To most people, a "GPS" tells you how to get some place, but for me it is always something that can tell you where you've been. A glance at the map it how you know where to go. Am I a maphead too?

Time Dimensional Maps

Maps are very good at showing a given place at a given time. Modern interactive maps allow easy exploration of two or three dimensions of the "snapshot". However, they don't do a very good job of showing time.

I would like to be able to visualize my ancestors and how they interacted and participated in historical events. A few issues come up with this:
1) How do you find the places?
Modern map companies do a great job of geocoding almost any address to its appropriate latitude and longitude. Past addresses are much more of a challenge. Using a database of modern names can probably get a lot of places (Boston is still Boston.) However, other place names have changed (where is Prussia?) Or even more confusing, some names may refer to something different today.
Some of this is somewhat mitigated by lack of detailed data as you travel back in history. (You may just have a county or even just a country.)
Some other data exists with Township/Section/Range descriptions. This could theoretically be converted to map locations, but takes a little work.
2) How do you represent time on a map?
You could color code different points to represent different time periods (years, decades, centuries or whatever is appropriate.) This allows for visualizing 'neighbors' in time, and associating them with events. (The person living in Boston in the 17th century probably didn't participate in the American Revolution...)
Another possibility is tracks. You could display the movement of individual people across time. With ancestry, there is also a clear linkage. This could provide a picture of migration.
With all of these approaches, the data representation could change as zoom level is changed, thus giving it an uncluttered approach.

With any approach, an important part is ease of use. Importing gedcom files would be a bare minimum approach. It could also be interesting to parse census data to show specific household migration (though this would be much more involved.) Getting township/section/range data on the map should also be automatic. A public location repository would also be useful. (Once you figure out where a location is in 1650, others should be able to use it.)