I found this nice collection of maps of Seoul, South Korea's largest city and capital from theSEOULlive. This is a website/magazine of Korean culture that "focuses on unraveling the hidden jewels of Seoul that can only be found with rumination." 

Unfortunately these maps are shown at a fairly low resolution so the details are hard to read. The maps vary from the purely pictorial,

to themed maps such as "Literature",

 "Mountain",

a map of medical facilities titled "Cure",

"Night",

and this schematic map with the river straightened out highlighting urban farming.

There is no easy link to the entire collection but you can browse them by clicking the Seoul Map dropdown at the top of theSEOULlive page and choosing the entries for 2017-2020.

A couple of interesting bike sharing graphics crossed my desk recently. Martin Austwick created videos of the Boston and Minneapolis bike sharing programs based on data released by the local agencies. Here is Boston. Click to get to the video.
The videos show approximate bike locations for each minute of the day. You can see the daily rises and dips in activity. It's remarkable how much activity there is at night (especially in October when it gets dark early.) Around 4AM it gets almost eerily silent and stays that way for a few hours.

For some reason the colors for the Minneapolis video and much more muted and the system is more spread out so it's not as visually arresting. Still, there's an impressive amount of activity throughout the day and night.
David Yanofsky created this graphic comparing the 29 worldwide bike sharing programs, all at the same scale.

This is an interesting  picture of both the programs and the comparative layout of each city. It also serves as a good reminder of how many significant places there are in Asia that we in North America have never even heard of. Even I had to look up Changwon and Zhongshan, both cities of over a million people.

Happy 12/12/12!


 Here are some maps and boring facts about highways designated as Route 12 - mostly from Wikipedia.

US Interstate 12 is one of the shortest major (one or two digit) interstates in the country running 85 miles along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain all in Louisiana. It is a shortcut that takes you from Interstate 10 back to Interstate 10 avoiding New Orleans. The road is also officially called the Republic of West Florida Parkway, in honor of that short lived republic created from an 1810 rebellion against Spanish rule.


By contrast US Route 12 is an almost cross country route running from Detroit to Aberdeen, Washington, almost 2,500 miles. The photo on the lower left was taken near the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Cass, where Route 12 officially begins. This photo came from the US Ends, a web site for people like me who are obsessed with where roads begin and end. On the left is a map of the Grays Harbor area at the western end of Route 12.



South Korea's Expressway Number 12 is also called the 88 Olympic Expressway. It runs across the southern part of the country.


There's many other highway 12's listed on Wikipedia's List of highways numbered 12 inlcuding the following three non-US routes chosen because I like their route shields.


Finally realizing that I forgot the awesome Kansas sunflower route shields (despite K-12 being retired,) here is another set of US state route shields. Once again, Happy 12/12/12!