"One fifth of urban and suburban US car owners express a definite interest in living car-free (18%), and an additional 40% are open to the idea. This is in addition to the small share (10%) of urban and suburban US residents currently living without a car"

This was the first Big Map I made, showing Kent in 1970, the year of the shooting. It labels businesses & landmarks, and includes buttons to press & hear oral histories. There are two versions - one on campus, and this one in the city historical society. 5 yrs later great to see it being 'lived in.'

I write about myths about small towns in my book. Adding: it's important to distinguish btwn small towns + rural places. To do this, you need to look at data below the county scale. But always glad to see more research on this! (also: "isn't mostly white" is wrong, but the authors don't argue this)

'Participatory Historical Geographies' Special Section - out now in Area! This collection, guest edited by @ruthslatter.bsky.social & @ed-brookes.bsky.social, reflects on the increasing use of participatory methods in historical geography. Read here⬇️ rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

You've heard of sneckdowns, now try

Quick map of the situation, after my friend's hand-drawn map. Surveys from several elem schools show parents are not letting their kids walk bc of drop-off chaos.

Chatting w a friend about a Safe Routes to School article I'm writing and just astounded that all buses, walkers, bikers, and most car drop offs for a 450+ student PreK-5 school are being funneled down this single street with *sidewalk only on one side* and only a 1 way stop sign. What are we doing?

Always explaining this to folks who want (expensive) underpasses or overpasses...

Spent an hour and a half this morning reading this series. Stories like this are twisted and woven so deeply into our communities that takes this much writing and months, years, of reporting to explain just how systems take hold and get stuck and kill people again and again and again.

Moved my 3D lightup map from the public library to the Historical Society today. A few repairs & it was ready for tomorrow’s Holiday Open House.

Through my teen and young adult years, we had a bookshop in my tiny hometown (Schuylerville, NY), run by a former city planner, that I spent hours and hours in. They're online-only now, but every once in a while they post gems like this. www.biblio.com/bookstore/ol...

On good days, sidewalks are clear and the city sends someone to fix the pedestrian button the day after you report it’s broken.

This is the conclusion that I hope we will draw from the Zillow drama... that we need a gold-standard national data source for property-level risk to climate hazards that is transparent, accessible, and legally defensible. Private companies can help build it but the public needs to own it.

They say they want kids to walk to school but then the schools do this.

After watching my dad care for my mom with Alzheimer's this hits close to home. There is an absolute vacuum of a support network. Until you arrive at hospice, who were amazing. But the void between the start of illness and the start of the dying process is cavernous. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/o...

Here’s more beautiful maps from atlases I *am* keeping (as inspiration for my cartography students).

Another atlas headed for recycling (yes, I've saved many but there are dozens just like this and I just cannot save them all). I had to translate what this glorious map was showing -- it's wind! And the location is Azerbaijan.

In my head this morning as I walked to work; because I have a ten year old.

Do you like #maps? The Independent Map Artists (mapartists.org) has hit a big milestone and now has 50(!) members, all interested in helping with your holiday shopping. Hundreds of maps & mappy goods, straight from small businesses. Connecting creators & customers is hard; please consider sharing.

This playground at The Battery in NYC restored my faith that we CAN do urban design right.

Most XKCD strips: fuck yeah science! A small number of special XKCD strips: *sobbing uncontrollably* fuck yeah science

We were out on a trail about a mile from the trailhead and a trailrunner came by who stopped to tell us that the trail ahead was good bc someone had been by to blow the leaves. It’s that deep in our consciousness.

It's that time of year when Americans set up quaint, walkable Christmas villages in their living rooms, dreaming of living in such a cozy place. ​Meanwhile, they'll show up to city council meetings to fiercely oppose any plan that would actually build that kind of car-lite community in real life.

I’ve been in the Merriman Valley a lot lately and it’s this juxtaposition of beautiful trails, great coffee, sewer infrastructure, and ugly shopping plazas. I need to read the neighborhood’s master plan — still in the city of Akron yet so distant from it. Right at the edge of the National Park.

GIS Day in the Community Geography Lab, including a mapathon georeferencing Sanborns using AllMaps.

The NACIS videos are up! Are you map-curious? Or map-obsessed (like me)? Scroll on through and see what you missed at our annual conference. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Mine is a how-to for making a lighted 3d neighborhood map www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5rd...

Our city recently decided that this side of a building (on a street corner) is a “facade” and thus is not allowed, and requires permission from council to be used for a mural. 🫠

“Someone with a 1-hr car commute needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work. On the other hand, if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.” #CityMakingMath 50 reasons to want more walkable cities.

Day 7 of #30DayMapChallenge asked us to think about accessibility. @gsagostini.bsky.social considers two metrics of access simultaneously: distance to a Subway and distance to the subway.

The New American Small Town was reviewed in JAPA -- excited to see it shared with the planners! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Another beautiful atlas saved from recycling. This one appears to be a guide for boating down a river in Belgium? Love the bridge illustrations.

Toured the new Davey Tree research & training campus today with students from around the US. The 200 acre campus & facilities were great but most impressed by their happy & enthusiastic employees. Glad they’re such good neighbors here in Kent & expanding (12,000 employees across the country!)

Snowing today, but the dawn redwood (one of only a few deciduous conifers) is warming up my lab with color 🧡. Our grounds manager tells me this was only planted 20 years ago but it already towers over our 4 story building.

"And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters" Beautiful cover of Fitzgerald by Ross Thorn, recorded this morning on the shores of Lake Superior. www.instagram.com/reel/DQ4hq80...

Just preaching my message of "wanting to do less more often" we all have our reasons.

To get a better sense of the neighborhood I thought I'd try showing how many people lived at each address because some were single-family homes and others apartments but they were getting the same symbol. Trying to add a business layer but that's a bit much in a static map.

Car brand BYD's new SUV ad pokes fun at people walking and cycling, comparing them to Horse & Carts. It joins a long list of car ads that sell a false promise of convenience and aspiration while punching down at sustainable transport modes. So I made it a bit more realistic...

#30daymapchallenge Day 7: Accessibility. Made a quick map for a friend of elementary school redistricting. Lots of ways to analyze this but of course my interest was in "how many students that could walk to school are now put into a non-walkable (further away) school/district?"

How do you map a neighborhood that doesn't exist anymore? By manually georeferencing it! 🫠 Building a case here that urban renewal segregated this integrated neighborhood of thousands of people.

There are a lot of arguments for why Mamdani won. I, a pundit, believe it was the typeface. www.curbed.com/article/zohr...

#30DayMapChallenge Day 2: Lines – The Secret Life of Streams 💧 UV light reveals piped streams. Early Wellington was shaped by streams flowing to the harbour. As the city grew, many were piped underground, hidden from sight but still running beneath our feet. #Wellington #Flooding #cartography

"Neighbourhood interiors were never intended for commercial activity", says one letter writer. To be fair, this is true, if you toss the entirety of human history and modern day Earth outside North America in the trash, and think that urban planning less than a century old is ironclad natural law.

Love this! All aboard for the #30DayMapChallenge (that I don't have time to ....well, maybe one or two....)

Day 1 #30DayMapChallenge: Points 🧵🪡 I created a hand-felted map of Wellington showing Community Emergency Hubs as buttons, using locations from the GWRC web map viewer (via the Natural Hazards Portal). It is roughly to scale, offering a soft, tactile take on community resilience. 💚

Your annual reminder that US streets and vehicles are generally not designed to keep pedestrians, especially small ones, safe. So wonderful Halloween is the most likely day you’ll kill a child with your car, and someone will kill a child you care about with theirs. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

This web map is beautiful! I’m a print map gal at heart, but this Shows how much creativity is possible. trollmap.com

The AI that we're entrusting our future to suggests that a similar book to transportation advocacy is either Celebrating 70 years of Porsche or The Correctional Officer's Guide.

This is huge! Would have loved it when I was living in Saratoga Springs. Too bad the actual downtown Albany train station was abandoned by rail in 1968. This one’s across the Hudson in Rensselaer. The old Albany station had 96 trains/day in 1900.

These are awesome @lwvohio.bsky.social tshirts for 2 reasons. 1. Map. 2. Democracy. 💜🇺🇸

Listening belatedly to @99pi.org ‘s Power Broker series & realizing it could be remade this year with this year’s politics and it would be entirely different. Not sure if it’s a particularly crazy year or just that Robert Moses is applicable to all politics always. Both, I think.