Roads about…

Why

A couple years ago I was on a road trip, leaving Minneapolis, when I noticed "501st Ave" intersecting our little highway. The numbers had been steadily increasing as we drove West. I thought "Numeric street names don't keep on rolling like that in North Carolina!" It got me thinking about how patterns of roads differ around the country. When we got home, I created maps of alphanumeric gridded roads showing these alphanumeric patterns for several States. Lots of States exhibit different patterns, I thought it was interesting. Someday maybe I'll make a national map.

Anyway, I've also noticed roads that fit a theme: "Death Star Lane" in my hometown (sci fi fan!). "Convertable Lane" on another road trip (gear head!). "Canis Minor Road" the next town over (astronomy buff!).

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to find all the roads that Dead Head fans had memorialized around the country?

This site does just that.

How it is made

I create a basemap using OpenStreetMap road geometry, attributed against US Census TIGER/Line county and state boundaries so every road carries a stable FIPS identifier.

A dataset of road names to FIDS ids is generated.

I've slowly traversed the most popular articles on Wikipedia (as published via QRank). For each term in Wikipedia (eg, "Star Wars") there, I use SparQL queries against the Wikidata Query Service to find related wikidata terms to the source Wikipedia term (characters related to, works by the creator, members of a class of thing, etc).

Finally, I match the street names to the Wikipedia terms (stripping out suffixes like Rd, Street, etc and prefixes like North or West). If there is a match, it goes on the map.

It can be pretty unclear why a road might match, so the actual Wikidata graph is represented with each match to explain how a term might end up on the map. For instance, you might see "Sun King Way matches the name of Sun King, which was performed by The Beatles".

What the entry cannot tell you

  • Intentionality: Just because a road matches a term on Wikipedia, that doesn't mean that it was intended: an 'Elvis Drive' might just be named after someone's uncle. But then again, sometimes I think the unintended references can be interesting or humurous. (Obviously not always, I tried to set some strict filtering to take out too common, or too loosely associated terms).
  • Comprehensiveness: OpenStreetMap street coverage is uneven; a quiet county may be under-mapped rather than under-named. (But its a lot better than TIGER data!)

Credits

Data sources:

Tools:

  • Astro: site framework
  • SST: infrastructure deployment
  • AWS: hosting infrastructure

Email me if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.