Visualizing Roads, Rivers and Rail in Pittsburgh and Cleveland

by Evan Tachovsky

Transportation cartography focuses on making complex systems easy to understand by exaggerating certain elements while suppressing others. This is great for helping us figure out how to get from point A to point B, but the downside is we miss out on seeing how beautiful and byzantine our transport systems actually are. The focus of the maps below takes a different approach, visualizing the roads, rail lines and rivers that make up the urban geographies in Pittsburgh and Cleveland in full.

Pittsburgh:

Cleveland:

Map data downloaded from OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org), the City of Pittsburgh (http://pittsburghpa.gov/dcp/gis/gis-data) and Cuyahoga County (http://gis.cuyahogacounty.us/).

Evan Tachovsky is a data analyst based in New York City and original from Northeast Ohio. He’s on Twitter @evantachovsky.

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