NYC (& the World) Without Highways
A map without highways! Jump to some notable highway-less places.
My utopian dream map
Almost all web maps these days have some kind of bike/walking/transit layer. While this is an improvement from an earlier internet era (when online maps seemed exclusively geared towards printing out driving directions!) there's one remaindered thing that almost always bugs me about these non-vehice-oriented map layers: they still show the highways!
My confusion is practical, personal, and mildly utopian. In New York City (where I live), a lot of the built environment is constrained by where highways allow pedestrian access via underpasses, overpasses, crossings, access roads and the like. In "The Power Broker", Robert Caro infamously details how Robert Moses' maliciously-chosen highway paths led to the destruction of vibrant and diverse neighborhoods. Given that I've never lived in a city that didn't have evil or ignorant highway construction, I'm interested in tools and strategies which help to conceptualize what "not having highways" would even feel or look like.
Which is where contemporary web maps come in! When I'm biking to work, or walking to a friend's house, and I'm obliged to walk over, under, or next to a highway, my mental model for "what this looks like" always feels very different from the model presented by Google Maps (or Apple Maps, or whichever map you prefer). With an overpass, it often feels like I'm walking on a sidewalk which crosses over the mouth of hell (or re-living the bridge scene in Sorcerer [1977], if that's a reference point). With an underpass or access road, it's very difficult and sometimes impossible on a web map to understand which streets "cross over" under a highway, let alone whether or not there are walk signals for pedestrians.
And so for quite some time, I've dreamed about what a map without highways might look like. When the Open Street Map project first started to be a thing, I had a hunch that this freely licensed, data-friendly map might provide a path to my dream map, but I wasn't really invested or competent enough to take things any further than digging around about how Open Street Maps "tags" its data.
Along came Mapzen, a company that makes tools which use Open Street Map data, and who recently posted about how they have a new (& elegant!) biker-optimized set of styles for their map. Map styles such as these are interesting: subtle changes in weight or colors can change the emphasis of real world features, thus holding a sort of subliminal power over how we see the streetscapes we live in.
Mapzen has a library for creating web maps called Tangram, which allows you to re-style maps on a webpage. A lot of the Tangram demos out there suffer from a problem that afflicts lots of other online mapping tools: in the hands of a non-cartographer (like me!), most people who mess around with their map's styles end up with something that looks like a heads up display or a Winamp skin. Which is to say: possibly cool at first glance, but maybe not weird, uncanny or beautiful.
Mapzen's bike map layer seems to be really well-thought out, though, and seemed to be as good a starting point as any for a highway-less map! Mapzen has a tool called Mapzen.js, which extends Leaflet.js, to render their re-style-able maps on a web page. All I had to do was to leverage their filtering logic and some rusty knowledge of OSM tags, and I cooked up the following highway-less map recipe:
global: {
# ...
sdk_road_shields: false
},
layers: {
roads: {
highway: {
visible: false
},
arrows: {
filter: {
none: [{kind:"highway"},{kind:"motorway"}]
}
},
'highway-exit': {
visible: false
}
},
pois: {
'highway-exit': {
visible: false
}
},
'highway-exit': {
visible: false
}
}
...essentially, this says "hide all highways, their onramps, any directional arrows associated with them, as well as their names (I-278) and exits".
I have to admit, I'm really jamming on the result! I'm reminded of a book that may have formed the seed of this idea a long time ago, "The Image of The City" by Kevin Lynch. In this book, Lynch comes up with an adorably-illustrated taxonomy of the shapes that help people to remember and find their way about a city: edges, nodes, paths, districts and landmarks. These categories also bear an uncanny resemblance to the graphics primitives used to draw digital maps (nodes, ways and relations).
Highways are "edges" in Lynch's taxonomy, but to me they are big dumb objects, whose presence at times feels (intentionally or otherwise) malicious. But this map shows what their absence might look like, even if we didn't replace the scars left behind with anything. Like creating a ton of rivers in the middle of the densest cities. Or a metropolis-scale erased DeKooning.
Places
Here are some places I'd like to highlight in particular:
- In Red Hook, Brooklyn, where I live, you can see how few streets there are which ford the great river of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
- The trough left behind by the Prospect Expressway almost looks like how rails-to-trails bike paths look (in part because of how the elevation is shaded). The pedestrian crossover at 8th ave. almost looks like a rope bridge.
- This part of Maspeth, between two cemeteries, almost reads as a quaint village.
- The absent tangle of cloverleafs in northern Manhattan and the Bronx reveals the truly few crossings here — though the High Bridge, a recently reopened aqueduct, stands tall!
- Similarly, the landing zone of the George Washington Bridge looks positively primeval.
Further afield:
- The Pasadena Freeway in LA is the oldest freeway in the US, but no gods no masters!!!
- The Cheseapeake Bay Bridge is wild and frightening to cross, but ultimately just some pylons in the middle of an estuary system.
- The I-90/I-5 interchange in Seattle looks like Kai's Power Goo.
- I-40 in Memphis was originally planned to cut thru Overton Park - on this map, it doesn't even exist.
- Detroit's Corktown looks like a DMZ, per Albert S.
- I-64, which careens thru downtown Louisville, almost looks like the Nazca Lines, via Michael S.
- A confluence of roads in Arlington, MA reveal an interrupted waterway! via Arthur S. (who also pointed out some missing highway-ish road types)
- Lance B. noted two different meandering & grade-separated roads in Cape Town, South Africa (these had originally escaped map erasure; updated filtering strategy here)
Please email me any interesting "erased highways" you find, and I'll add them here! And this map is probably missing some categories of highway-like road which *should* be highways: if you see those, I'll try to track down what they are, and why they might not be erased from this map. And don't forget to press the "Reveal Hidden Highways" button to see the before/after effect!
Update: I'm now tracking the changes to the code which produces the map styles here.