Interactive Road Orientation Distributions – How Ordered is Your Town?

San Francisco Road Orientation DistributionsAn image created by Seth Kadish at Vizual Statistix caught my eye in my Twitter timeline yesterday showing road orientation distributions (i.e. what directions the roads go in) for a number of US cities.  Being British, the idea of roads forming a nice, thought-out pattern is completely alien to me and takes all the fun out of trying to get lost but the visualisations intrigued me none the less.  The calculations used by Seth had a few limitations as the length of each street didn’t influence the plot and a twisty street would only register in a single orientation rather than being split appropriately.  So time to step up to the plate to see if I can find a more interactive and representative way of doing the same thing.

Continue reading

Strava Bookmarklets – Map Flipper for Open Cycle/Street Map and Ordnance Survey

Map Flipper BookmarkletsFollowing on from my last post about my bookmarklet to view any Strava route, activity or segment in 3D, here is the follow-up post about a far more simple bookmarklet that will swap out the default Google Maps found in the Strava website for a choice of Open Cycle, Landscape and Street Maps or the Ordnance Survey maps in the UK.  At least here in the UK the Google Maps can be rather limiting from a cycling or running perspective due to a distinct lack of detail, particularly around off-road routes.  Fortunately the Open Maps (and even more so the Ordnance Survey maps) have detail in spades and with a bit of JavaScript magic we can swap out the Google Maps for the alternative map of our choosing.

Continue reading