16 ms·

Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure

478 points by grrrtttt 10y ago

mmanfrin 10y ago
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that more than 95 percent of overseas trade produced or consumed by the United States moves through our ports. Who woulda thought that overseas trade would go through ports.
- joekrill 10y ago
  Airplanes go overseas, but not through ports.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    Not even air-ports?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Noseshine 10y ago
  It could go through ports in Canada or Mexico. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I don't think that possibility can just be dismissed without even looking at the data. I could imagine that things like legal stuff can influence the stream of goods, not just geography. For example, CETA was just signed while the larger agreement that would include the US now has no chance. I don't know if there is anything in there that might compel a US based company to move things through Canada (and their subsidiary there), but at least it has to be investigated, I don't think consequences of such agreements are immediately obvious, at least they are not to me. I also would not have dismissed air freight so easily. I would think that while it sure delivers a lot less mass I would assume the parts carried by air probably are much more valuable than what's on the ships, so in terms of monetary value I would not have been surprised to see a higher share. Just think of UPS and FedEx and their big fleets.
- rattray 10y ago
  The alternatives are road/rail (via Canada or Mexico) and air. Presumably very little overseas trade is routed through Canada and Mexico, but it's certainly possible. I personally would have guessed a higher percentage would come through air than 5%.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    A really large amount goes through Canada. The port of Vancouver is bigger than Oakland, and the port of Manzanillo Mexico is only slightly smaller. Both ports have rail connections to the US interior. The Mexican ports have lower market share because they are pretty far from Chinese origins, but if you want to amuse yourself you can Google up a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about the connections between Mexican ports and the US city of Kansas City. Many deranged people believe that the Mexicans are usurping our sovereignty via an obscure customs office in Kansas City that is (barely) connected by rail to the port of Lazaro Cardenas.
- tn13 10y ago
  95% trade means what ? Is it by the cost of shipments size ?
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Vs. our land borders. This is going to ake for an interesting showdown given that most ports are in major metro areas.
Fillipoman 10y ago
There's a lot of interesting data in the article, but some of the visualizations remind me of this: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/.
- amyjess 10y ago
  I thought the same thing too, and I found it particularly intriguing when some of the maps actually inverted the population map, like the wind power map.
glup 10y ago
For context, here's population http://i.imgur.com/mcA2hWa.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mcA2hWa.jpg. Kind of obvious, but a lot of infrastructure (esp. for resource extraction) is far away from centers of population.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Most infrastructure will be. The idea of using city spaces to put your infrastructure has always been a bit daft. Vertical Farming is one example. As we have seen multiple times on HN new apartments would be more welcome than farms. The cost of transport which these maps show in some detail is small because of our infrastructure (e.g. rail, barge, truck, and vessels). Crops and livestock really do ok in rural areas. Livestock[2] does better roaming between the summer and winter fields. Energy generation is another rural activity. Although solar is fine on roofs[1], wind is rather annoying to live next to and with the possibility of fire when those turbines go best kept away from town. Coal, gas, and nuclear power plants aren't very welcome either. 1) even then, I get the feeling a lot of architects would rather have green spaces instead. 2) ok, well turkeys as we raise them are not an outdoor animal
  - vacri 10y ago
    > Energy generation is another rural activity. Although solar is fine on roofs[1], wind is rather annoying to live next to... It was interesting to see just how notably absent windpower was in the South (excluding Texas). What's the reason for such apparent opposition to it? Curious.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Well, looking at the South (other than Texas), I'm not sure its really flat enough for the investment. To make it worth it you really need a large flat area with a lot of constant wind. The great plains (ND to Texas) is a much better investment than Alabama. I would bet offshore in the Gulf is worth it[1]. The great plains is not exactly built out yet. Never mind hooking all to a grid that can take it. Plus, wind power (traditional) does kill birds and bats so there is a problems there. 1) it does apparently given the UK experience improve the fishing
steven777400 10y ago
Not trying to nitpick, but at least a tiny sliver of this data is misleading: the Amtrak stations markers include locations that are definitely not passenger rail stations. For example, the map shows a half-dozen dots on the southwest Washington state coast, but the only western Washington passenger rail service is up and down I-5, and then eastbound from there.
- glup 10y ago
  I thought they included it for the freight network (IIRC the overwhelming majority of train traffic in the US is freight). It would be nice to distinguish the two.
- lazarogamio 10y ago
  Hey there, I was involved in making these maps. You're absolutely correct. We used point data from BTS (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_atlas_database/2015/point http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...), and did not filter out non-train station types. We're fixing this now.
  - knz 10y ago
    I'm curious what software you and other media agencies use to make the maps (ESRI?) and how they manage their GIS data (any enterprise GIS software or just a bunch of shapefiles sitting on a network share)? Do they actively collect datasets or just pull it in as needed?
    - lazarogamio 10y ago
      We use QGIS at the Post, which is open source. For organizing shapefiles, we don't really use anything fancy, just a shared folder. If we find something very useful, we put it in there.
      - knz 10y ago
        Awesome, it's great to see QGIS getting more popular. Thanks for the reply!
serge2k 10y ago
> Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote in a blog post that government investment in our electrical infrastructure may not be necessary. “Private companies and public agencies are already taking care of this kind [of infrastructure], so if Trump’s plan applied to them, they would get tax credits for spending money they would have spent anyway,” he wrote. “That’s not revenue neutral.” What a surprise, the libertarians don't want the government to do anything.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  If only Randal O'Toole were actually a libertarian. He claims to dislike the government, but he pretty much loves government urban planning. Not sure why he's at Cato. (For more political diversity, I guess?) Also he calls himself a "pragmatist", not a "true libertarian". Take that as you will.
  - davidw 10y ago
    That guy is very well known to people who frequent sites like http://marketurbanism.com/ http://marketurbanism.com/ He's very much in favor of sprawl, and anti-density, despite lots of good evidence that markets would provide plenty of density if left to themselves.
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      Yeah, I wish he would just stop calling his blog "the Antiplanner" if he's not going to actually, you know, oppose planning. Ah well.
      - khuey 10y ago
        It's a shame your original post was flagged and killed, because it's right on the money.
- philippnagel 10y ago
  Isn't a public agency per definition part of the government?
huangc10 10y ago
10 most populous cities in America (by order of most to least): New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose. Honorable mention: San Francisco is at 13th
- mahyarm 10y ago
  To get a better sense of what is actually the top list, we should be sorting by metro area.
  - largote 10y ago
    Agreed. A city proper is definitely not an isolated social and economic "unit"; therefore limiting comparisons to it will not give you the information you really want to make decisions.
  - localtalent 10y ago
    I agree, but sometimes 'metro area' is a bizarre distinction. NYC's Metropolitan Division includes Ocean County (Jersey shore) but not Essex County (which includes Newark and all of the PATH trains). The Metropolitan Statistical Area includes Pike County (not accessible by commuter rail from NYC) but not New Haven or Fairfield (which are). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
- gumby 10y ago
  > Honorable mention: San Francisco is at 13th SF is artificially small due to how the line was drawn. Even the Census Region is not really correct since it considers SF and SJ as different zones, which artificially pumps up SJ's significance. In reality "SF"-the-region includes Silicon Valley and the East Bay, and includes the non-agricultural (basically northern part) of San Jose as a suburb.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Is it San Francisco or is it the San Jose-Oakland Metroplex? I kind of expect people will say it is San Francisco and speculate that the other is closer to the truth.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
Related, here's a diagram that shows energy flows in our economy, from the raw material source (oil, gas...) through the sectors, industries, and specific use: http://energyliteracy.com/ http://energyliteracy.com/ (for example, most oil is for transportation, most of which is highway, about 3/4 of which is light-duty vehicles, which is roughly 50% cars and 50% light trucks, about 1/3 of which are to earn a living...) via https://www.fastcoexist.com/3062630/visualizing/this-very-very-detailed-chart-shows-how-all-the-energy-in-the-us-is-used https://www.fastcoexist.com/3062630/visualizing/this-very-ve... via https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/DLcTGBpwZSF?sfc=true https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/DLcTGBpwZSF?sfc=tr...
- cypherpunks01 10y ago
  This is great! Very dense with information but gives a very good high level view of where it all comes from and goes to.
- ci5er 10y ago
  I got banned from an energy-related sub-reddit for making a point in a discussion about solar using the diagram in your first link. Context is a bannable offense! :-) Seriously, though: context is very important. You can't have a meaningful discussion if people are comparing tailpipe to tailpipe. You need a cradle-to-grave view of the system and its inputs, chained back, at least one step and maybe two. It's cumbersome, but otherwise, people keep debating with their comparisons between apples and wheelbarrows. I used to think that people who were picking a micro-location for their PoV/stance were acting disingenuously. But, I've learned that - they really don't know! (Some remain remarkably incurious once shown, though...) Anyway: thanks for that link. It's one of my all time favorite Sankey diagrams, which I found by accident after digging after that earlier one from LLNL...
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    > I used to think that people who were picking a micro-location for their PoV/stance were acting disingenuously. But, I've learned that - they really don't know! (Some remain remarkably incurious once shown, though...) Yeah, I understand your frustration. My feeling is that people want to feel like they're doing good, and if you come along and show them that they're just pissing in the ocean... your rhetoric better be really smooth. Which is why, truthfully, I usually don't bother. It's not my skillset.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
Looking at this behemoth infrastructure, one can safely say that by just tweaking/updating existing maintenance related policies, a plenty of new jobs can be added. Not to mention implementing policies for the addition of new infrastructure. For example adding more windmills or installing more solar plants etc etc.
- gumby 10y ago
  > one can safely say that by just tweaking/updating existing maintenance related policies, a plenty of new jobs can be added. Actually one can't safely say that as one can see from the 2007/8 bail out. The supposedly "shovel ready" projects weren't (if they were indeed shovel ready they would already have been funded). There was a lot of approval that had to be done and many of the jobs were for skilled, not unskilled labor, so really couldn't suck up that many new people. The economy is structurally quite different from the 1930s when the WPA could, if not bail the economy out, at least reduce the burden and get something for it. In addition, where's the money? The current plan, AFAICT, is to sell off infrastructure (bridges, highways, water systems) in perpetuity and let the new owner charge tolls and the like. A system that hasn't worked that well in the US since the 1800s.
gumby 10y ago
Two things jump out at me: are there really that many bridges in need of maintenance in the Bay Area? Caltrans is making a big investment (e.g. Bay Bridge, Benecia etc). I am also amazed at how much freight still comes into SF/Oakland and New York. Perhaps the "SF" traffic is actually Pittsburg and Stockton and I just can't see it clearly at this resolution.
- Tiksi 10y ago
  A lot of the NY freight is probably going into Port Newark-Elizabeth (Which is considered part of the Port of NY and NJ) but the resolution isn't high enough to show that. So there's probably not nearly as much freight going into NY proper as there looks to be.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  The port of Pittsburg is teensy and the port of Stockton is specialized. Container traffic at Oakland is pretty heavy and many cars are offloaded at Vallejo. There are also the oil terminals at Richmond and elsewhere.
  - gumby 10y ago
    Thanks, I wasn't thinking hard enough! I've driven past those terminals in Richmond and Vallejo but haven't paid enough attention.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  One note about the bridges: Basically, any elevated section of road seems to qualified as a bridge. That's why you can follow the interstates on the map; they're full of overpasses.
prions 10y ago
As a Civil Engineer myself, I feel like people don't realize the amount of underlying stuff that goes into even basic infrastructure projects. There's layers of planning, design, permitting, regulations and bidding involved. It usually takes years to finally get to construction and even then there's a whole host of issues that arise that can delay even a simple project. Case in point: I was the principal inspector for a small pump station project, estimated two weeks of construction and it took just over 3 months. There's definitely room for improvement though. A big part of the issue is the mismatch between the private and municipal sides of the project. As someone on the private side as a consultant, it can be really frustrating to constantly jump through bureaucratic hoops that come across as massive wastes of time and money.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Is there a role for technology to play in simplifying this problem for the decision makers?
  - prions 10y ago
    Absolutely. In fact I've developed some Python programs for my own firm that have really sped up our productivity. It's actually led my to leaving civil engineering and going for my masters in CS soon! I hope one day I can make some wide changes in the industry but the market for it is quite small. The issue with technology in municipal governments is with budgeting and the "It works, why do we need to change it?" mentality. Governments will still insist on things sent in formats that were modern 20 years ago, why should I have to send 5 paper copies by mail to the DEP or mail a CD? The civil engineering industry as a whole is still very paper based as well. Paper copies are signed and sealed by hand and sent in copies out to clients/bidders. Having to spend time printing everything gets extremely time and resource consuming. The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept. There are pushes in the right direction, but change is slow and many don't see the incentive of upending entire systems even though they can provide a real benefit.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
PaulHoule 10y ago
No communication networks -- people in underserved areas are crying out for fiber or anything better than DSL. It's not clear anybody really wants more electric lines or pipelines but very clear that people want better internet.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I don't know what the situation is now but a few years ago I couldn't get DSL (too many feet) while I watched them bury fiber about 2.5 miles away (the fiber was adding capacity to the nearby town). So at such a grand scale, a fiber map probably wouldn't really show many of the under-served areas. I was using 3g, I bet 4g is currently the best option.
  - PaulHoule 10y ago
    4g can be a good option, but in many places in the U.S. there are hills and trees in the way. For instance the "Appalachin Mountains" region is where wireless goes to die.
    - tbihl 10y ago
      To an incredible degree, too. The Sprint commercials about basically being the same are true almost everywhere I've been in the past few years, so I've been using project Fi (Google's service) for a while. But every time I travel back to VA, I'm thrown back into a world of hunting for signal that I'd almost forgotten.
    - douche 10y ago
      It's really bizarre. Where my parents live, I can be almost line-of-sight to a cell-tower operated by my carrier (literally visible across the valley, two miles away), and I get barely two bars, with calls flaking out constantly. And forget about data.
      - hydrogen18 10y ago
        Just because you can see the tower doesn't mean the antennas are pointed in your direction. Furthermore, signal doesn't mean jack. I have a great 'LTE' signal all over where I live in Austin but only get about 0.25 mbps of download speed.
bikamonki 10y ago
Wait! You are missing Central America, South America, Mexico and Canada. Either that or you have the wrong title :)
tn13 10y ago
I am a road enthusiast. I have driven on almost every single major road in CA Nevada and especially the deserted "no one goes there" type roads. I also take interest in history of roads. California has been sitting ducks on some really important road proposals or last so many years despite the deaths they have been causing. My suspicion is that politicians want to push trains and other larger projects where they might get kickbacks instead of upgrading existing roads. Here are some observations: 1. Highway 1 seems to be under repair all the year for last 3 years. 2. Highway 152 is the only major road that connects SJ with I-5. despite this it is one lane for a large part. It has very high fatality and traffic jam rate. Decades have passed since government planned to broaden it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_152 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_152] 3. Panoche road. Not sure why this road exists. But since it does then making it an expressway could have helped create an alternative to 152 reducing traffic and accidents. 4. Then there is Route 130 that connections bay area to I-5. Several times it was proposed that this route be widened as an alternative to 152 but it never went ahead. I once saw a car fall several feet below the road just because he got spooked to see me coming in opposite direction. It is that desolated.
- _delirium 10y ago
  Every part of CA I've lived in has had a ton of money going into constant road construction, so this isn't quite my impression. The state's budget in this area is huge, in the billions annually. When I lived in L.A., they built an entire new, 6-lane freeway near where I lived. To relieve congestion on the 10, they just built a second parallel freeway, the 210, that doubled up the route! L.A. has so many freeways now that you can just treat them as arterial roads. If you miss your freeway interchange, no need to backtrack, just keep going and take the next freeway. I also lived for some years south of SF, and from that vantage point it seemed like a ton of money was being put into roads too. Highway 17 (San Jose to Santa Cruz) has had hundreds of millions poured into widening and safety upgrades. There was just a few years ago a major tunnel-boring project on Highway 1 to replace the "Devil's slide" portion between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay with new tubes put right through the mountain. And the continual freeway-ification of US-101 south of Gilroy has had money going into it just about every year. And heck, although much of it dates back a bit earlier, the Valley is the only place I've ever lived that has not only the normal three tiers of: interstate freeways, U.S. expressways, and state expressways, but also county expressways, like Montague Expressway and San Tomas Expressway. And yet doesn't have even halfway decent public transit (Caltrain barely counts).
deegles 10y ago
Fascinating to see how closely coal and natural gas map to states that went red in the election vs. all the renewables in blue states. Here's a map: http://www.270towin.com/ http://www.270towin.com/
_delirium 10y ago
As an addendum to the two maps here showing freight tonnage by rail and water route, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics has a nice one that overlays rail/water/truck tonnage on one map: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/transportation_in_the_united_states_2013/moving_goods.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
fjarlq 10y ago
In case lazarogamio is still reading comments here, some feedback: I have mild red-green color blindness (deuteranopia), which I think is why I'm having trouble reading a couple of the maps. For example, I can't distinguish the bridges in need of repair from the rest of the bridges. The pipelines map is also pretty difficult to read. Better color choices, and high-resolution images, would be much appreciated. Thanks!
- lazarogamio 10y ago
  I'm still reading :) Sorry for this, I'll look into something to make this easier for you in the article. In the meanwhile, we published some high-res versions of the maps on reddit, which hopefully are better for you. Electric grid: https://i.redd.it/2nkdq2bx101y.jpg https://i.redd.it/2nkdq2bx101y.jpg Pipelines: https://i.redd.it/mu945myovz0y.jpg https://i.redd.it/mu945myovz0y.jpg Airports: https://i.redd.it/m9p0mpy2wz0y.jpg https://i.redd.it/m9p0mpy2wz0y.jpg Ports: https://i.redd.it/2khvrwe6201y.jpg https://i.redd.it/2khvrwe6201y.jpg Bridges: https://i.redd.it/enf1rtz9z21y.jpg https://i.redd.it/enf1rtz9z21y.jpg
  - fjarlq 10y ago
    Awesome, thank you!
njwi332 10y ago
If anyone is interested in infrastructure, I highly recommend "On the Grid" (https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Average-Neighborhood-Systems-World/dp/1609611381 https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Average-Neighborhood-Systems-Wor...) Excellent book that goes over all the systems making up a city. I read it a couple of years ago but off the top of my head, it covers electricity, telecommunications, roads, public transport, three water systems (freshwater, sewage, rainwater) and how they are all interconnected.
known 10y ago
Curious to know the infrastructure before 1970
DrScump 10y ago
Am I the only one who fears that these maps would be useful to terrorists?
- douche 10y ago
  Most of this information you could pick up from a good set of gas station maps.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  Think about the implications of making the locations of these sites secret in a free society. Would the existence of plants be hidden from locals? Should it be illegal to talk about aggregations of plants and debate them? If the existence of the plants is too dangerous for civil discourse, maybe we shouldn't have them at all, to play devil's advocate.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  They would be useful to terrorists. But they are more useful to people with peaceful purposes, by several orders of magnitude. Any use that a terrorist could find for them can also be found by a security auditor role-playing as an attacker. If a terrorist could find a weak point in the infrastructure that may be exploited, so too may a defender, who may then devise a countermeasure, rather than an attack plan. Those countermeasures would not necessarily appear on the maps. For instance, there may be a motion-sensing surveillance camera watching a locked gate on an access road to a reservoir for a municipal water supply. Such measures are sufficient to foil impulsive attacks, and planned attacks very often generate suspicious activity reports and probable cause for investigations well in advance of the planned event. In theory, the maps may be a security risk. In practice, they cannot substitute for in-person investigation of specific sites, and most important infrastructure elements are at least partially protected against impulse crimes and accidental damage by chain-link fences, concrete barriers, motion sensors, and cameras. The typical terrorist candidate doesn't have satellite-guided ICBMs--they have to actually go to something in order to attack it. And they are constrained by the need for their attacks to be significant, public, and obvious.
deleted 10y ago
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ceejay 10y ago
It's probably an apples to oranges comparison, but the image of America's electric grid looks like the prototypical "disaster" scenario when you're a new hire and walk into a train wreck of a server room that's been ignored or half-heartedly managed for years :)
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It seems they may have pulled the power line information from OpenStreetMap. If that is the case, it's partly the data that is messy and incomplete. As far as apples and oranges, I think that's right, 2 lines dozens of miles long crossing in the middle of nowhere is no problem at all.
donutz 10y ago
Ever driven through any of California's oil fields? Drive through someplace like Taft, and you'll see that the number of pipes just there on the property probably dwarf the amount of pipes moving that oil across the country.
euyyn 10y ago
I first thought all those aligned bridges were following the course of rivers. But it seems that most of them just cross over railways! Compare: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/img/bridges-1480.jpg?c=400 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-ame... (bridges) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/img/rails-1480.jpg?c=348 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-ame... (railways).

478 points by grrrtttt 10y ago

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that more than 95 percent of overseas trade produced or consumed by the United States moves through our ports. Who woulda thought that overseas trade would go through ports.

joekrill 10y ago
Airplanes go overseas, but not through ports.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Not even air-ports?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Noseshine 10y ago
It could go through ports in Canada or Mexico. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I don't think that possibility can just be dismissed without even looking at the data. I could imagine that things like legal stuff can influence the stream of goods, not just geography. For example, CETA was just signed while the larger agreement that would include the US now has no chance. I don't know if there is anything in there that might compel a US based company to move things through Canada (and their subsidiary there), but at least it has to be investigated, I don't think consequences of such agreements are immediately obvious, at least they are not to me. I also would not have dismissed air freight so easily. I would think that while it sure delivers a lot less mass I would assume the parts carried by air probably are much more valuable than what's on the ships, so in terms of monetary value I would not have been surprised to see a higher share. Just think of UPS and FedEx and their big fleets.
rattray 10y ago
The alternatives are road/rail (via Canada or Mexico) and air. Presumably very little overseas trade is routed through Canada and Mexico, but it's certainly possible. I personally would have guessed a higher percentage would come through air than 5%.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  A really large amount goes through Canada. The port of Vancouver is bigger than Oakland, and the port of Manzanillo Mexico is only slightly smaller. Both ports have rail connections to the US interior. The Mexican ports have lower market share because they are pretty far from Chinese origins, but if you want to amuse yourself you can Google up a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about the connections between Mexican ports and the US city of Kansas City. Many deranged people believe that the Mexicans are usurping our sovereignty via an obscure customs office in Kansas City that is (barely) connected by rail to the port of Lazaro Cardenas.
tn13 10y ago
95% trade means what ? Is it by the cost of shipments size ?
anigbrowl 10y ago
Vs. our land borders. This is going to ake for an interesting showdown given that most ports are in major metro areas.

Fillipoman 10y ago

There's a lot of interesting data in the article, but some of the visualizations remind me of this: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/.

amyjess 10y ago
I thought the same thing too, and I found it particularly intriguing when some of the maps actually inverted the population map, like the wind power map.

glup 10y ago

For context, here's population http://i.imgur.com/mcA2hWa.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mcA2hWa.jpg. Kind of obvious, but a lot of infrastructure (esp. for resource extraction) is far away from centers of population.

protomyth 10y ago
Most infrastructure will be. The idea of using city spaces to put your infrastructure has always been a bit daft. Vertical Farming is one example. As we have seen multiple times on HN new apartments would be more welcome than farms. The cost of transport which these maps show in some detail is small because of our infrastructure (e.g. rail, barge, truck, and vessels). Crops and livestock really do ok in rural areas. Livestock[2] does better roaming between the summer and winter fields. Energy generation is another rural activity. Although solar is fine on roofs[1], wind is rather annoying to live next to and with the possibility of fire when those turbines go best kept away from town. Coal, gas, and nuclear power plants aren't very welcome either. 1) even then, I get the feeling a lot of architects would rather have green spaces instead. 2) ok, well turkeys as we raise them are not an outdoor animal
- vacri 10y ago
  > Energy generation is another rural activity. Although solar is fine on roofs[1], wind is rather annoying to live next to... It was interesting to see just how notably absent windpower was in the South (excluding Texas). What's the reason for such apparent opposition to it? Curious.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Well, looking at the South (other than Texas), I'm not sure its really flat enough for the investment. To make it worth it you really need a large flat area with a lot of constant wind. The great plains (ND to Texas) is a much better investment than Alabama. I would bet offshore in the Gulf is worth it[1]. The great plains is not exactly built out yet. Never mind hooking all to a grid that can take it. Plus, wind power (traditional) does kill birds and bats so there is a problems there. 1) it does apparently given the UK experience improve the fishing

steven777400 10y ago

Not trying to nitpick, but at least a tiny sliver of this data is misleading: the Amtrak stations markers include locations that are definitely not passenger rail stations. For example, the map shows a half-dozen dots on the southwest Washington state coast, but the only western Washington passenger rail service is up and down I-5, and then eastbound from there.

glup 10y ago
I thought they included it for the freight network (IIRC the overwhelming majority of train traffic in the US is freight). It would be nice to distinguish the two.
lazarogamio 10y ago
Hey there, I was involved in making these maps. You're absolutely correct. We used point data from BTS (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_atlas_database/2015/point http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...), and did not filter out non-train station types. We're fixing this now.
- knz 10y ago
  I'm curious what software you and other media agencies use to make the maps (ESRI?) and how they manage their GIS data (any enterprise GIS software or just a bunch of shapefiles sitting on a network share)? Do they actively collect datasets or just pull it in as needed?
  - lazarogamio 10y ago
    We use QGIS at the Post, which is open source. For organizing shapefiles, we don't really use anything fancy, just a shared folder. If we find something very useful, we put it in there.
    - knz 10y ago
      Awesome, it's great to see QGIS getting more popular. Thanks for the reply!

serge2k 10y ago

> Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote in a blog post that government investment in our electrical infrastructure may not be necessary. “Private companies and public agencies are already taking care of this kind [of infrastructure], so if Trump’s plan applied to them, they would get tax credits for spending money they would have spent anyway,” he wrote. “That’s not revenue neutral.” What a surprise, the libertarians don't want the government to do anything.

snrplfth 10y ago
If only Randal O'Toole were actually a libertarian. He claims to dislike the government, but he pretty much loves government urban planning. Not sure why he's at Cato. (For more political diversity, I guess?) Also he calls himself a "pragmatist", not a "true libertarian". Take that as you will.
- davidw 10y ago
  That guy is very well known to people who frequent sites like http://marketurbanism.com/ http://marketurbanism.com/ He's very much in favor of sprawl, and anti-density, despite lots of good evidence that markets would provide plenty of density if left to themselves.
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    Yeah, I wish he would just stop calling his blog "the Antiplanner" if he's not going to actually, you know, oppose planning. Ah well.
    - khuey 10y ago
      It's a shame your original post was flagged and killed, because it's right on the money.
philippnagel 10y ago
Isn't a public agency per definition part of the government?

huangc10 10y ago

10 most populous cities in America (by order of most to least): New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose. Honorable mention: San Francisco is at 13th

mahyarm 10y ago
To get a better sense of what is actually the top list, we should be sorting by metro area.
- largote 10y ago
  Agreed. A city proper is definitely not an isolated social and economic "unit"; therefore limiting comparisons to it will not give you the information you really want to make decisions.
- localtalent 10y ago
  I agree, but sometimes 'metro area' is a bizarre distinction. NYC's Metropolitan Division includes Ocean County (Jersey shore) but not Essex County (which includes Newark and all of the PATH trains). The Metropolitan Statistical Area includes Pike County (not accessible by commuter rail from NYC) but not New Haven or Fairfield (which are). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
gumby 10y ago
> Honorable mention: San Francisco is at 13th SF is artificially small due to how the line was drawn. Even the Census Region is not really correct since it considers SF and SJ as different zones, which artificially pumps up SJ's significance. In reality "SF"-the-region includes Silicon Valley and the East Bay, and includes the non-agricultural (basically northern part) of San Jose as a suburb.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Is it San Francisco or is it the San Jose-Oakland Metroplex? I kind of expect people will say it is San Francisco and speculate that the other is closer to the truth.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

Related, here's a diagram that shows energy flows in our economy, from the raw material source (oil, gas...) through the sectors, industries, and specific use: http://energyliteracy.com/ http://energyliteracy.com/ (for example, most oil is for transportation, most of which is highway, about 3/4 of which is light-duty vehicles, which is roughly 50% cars and 50% light trucks, about 1/3 of which are to earn a living...) via https://www.fastcoexist.com/3062630/visualizing/this-very-very-detailed-chart-shows-how-all-the-energy-in-the-us-is-used https://www.fastcoexist.com/3062630/visualizing/this-very-ve... via https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/DLcTGBpwZSF?sfc=true https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/DLcTGBpwZSF?sfc=tr...

cypherpunks01 10y ago
This is great! Very dense with information but gives a very good high level view of where it all comes from and goes to.
ci5er 10y ago
I got banned from an energy-related sub-reddit for making a point in a discussion about solar using the diagram in your first link. Context is a bannable offense! :-) Seriously, though: context is very important. You can't have a meaningful discussion if people are comparing tailpipe to tailpipe. You need a cradle-to-grave view of the system and its inputs, chained back, at least one step and maybe two. It's cumbersome, but otherwise, people keep debating with their comparisons between apples and wheelbarrows. I used to think that people who were picking a micro-location for their PoV/stance were acting disingenuously. But, I've learned that - they really don't know! (Some remain remarkably incurious once shown, though...) Anyway: thanks for that link. It's one of my all time favorite Sankey diagrams, which I found by accident after digging after that earlier one from LLNL...
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  > I used to think that people who were picking a micro-location for their PoV/stance were acting disingenuously. But, I've learned that - they really don't know! (Some remain remarkably incurious once shown, though...) Yeah, I understand your frustration. My feeling is that people want to feel like they're doing good, and if you come along and show them that they're just pissing in the ocean... your rhetoric better be really smooth. Which is why, truthfully, I usually don't bother. It's not my skillset.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

Looking at this behemoth infrastructure, one can safely say that by just tweaking/updating existing maintenance related policies, a plenty of new jobs can be added. Not to mention implementing policies for the addition of new infrastructure. For example adding more windmills or installing more solar plants etc etc.

gumby 10y ago
> one can safely say that by just tweaking/updating existing maintenance related policies, a plenty of new jobs can be added. Actually one can't safely say that as one can see from the 2007/8 bail out. The supposedly "shovel ready" projects weren't (if they were indeed shovel ready they would already have been funded). There was a lot of approval that had to be done and many of the jobs were for skilled, not unskilled labor, so really couldn't suck up that many new people. The economy is structurally quite different from the 1930s when the WPA could, if not bail the economy out, at least reduce the burden and get something for it. In addition, where's the money? The current plan, AFAICT, is to sell off infrastructure (bridges, highways, water systems) in perpetuity and let the new owner charge tolls and the like. A system that hasn't worked that well in the US since the 1800s.

gumby 10y ago

Two things jump out at me: are there really that many bridges in need of maintenance in the Bay Area? Caltrans is making a big investment (e.g. Bay Bridge, Benecia etc). I am also amazed at how much freight still comes into SF/Oakland and New York. Perhaps the "SF" traffic is actually Pittsburg and Stockton and I just can't see it clearly at this resolution.

Tiksi 10y ago
A lot of the NY freight is probably going into Port Newark-Elizabeth (Which is considered part of the Port of NY and NJ) but the resolution isn't high enough to show that. So there's probably not nearly as much freight going into NY proper as there looks to be.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
The port of Pittsburg is teensy and the port of Stockton is specialized. Container traffic at Oakland is pretty heavy and many cars are offloaded at Vallejo. There are also the oil terminals at Richmond and elsewhere.
- gumby 10y ago
  Thanks, I wasn't thinking hard enough! I've driven past those terminals in Richmond and Vallejo but haven't paid enough attention.
jdmichal 10y ago
One note about the bridges: Basically, any elevated section of road seems to qualified as a bridge. That's why you can follow the interstates on the map; they're full of overpasses.

prions 10y ago

As a Civil Engineer myself, I feel like people don't realize the amount of underlying stuff that goes into even basic infrastructure projects. There's layers of planning, design, permitting, regulations and bidding involved. It usually takes years to finally get to construction and even then there's a whole host of issues that arise that can delay even a simple project. Case in point: I was the principal inspector for a small pump station project, estimated two weeks of construction and it took just over 3 months. There's definitely room for improvement though. A big part of the issue is the mismatch between the private and municipal sides of the project. As someone on the private side as a consultant, it can be really frustrating to constantly jump through bureaucratic hoops that come across as massive wastes of time and money.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Is there a role for technology to play in simplifying this problem for the decision makers?
- prions 10y ago
  Absolutely. In fact I've developed some Python programs for my own firm that have really sped up our productivity. It's actually led my to leaving civil engineering and going for my masters in CS soon! I hope one day I can make some wide changes in the industry but the market for it is quite small. The issue with technology in municipal governments is with budgeting and the "It works, why do we need to change it?" mentality. Governments will still insist on things sent in formats that were modern 20 years ago, why should I have to send 5 paper copies by mail to the DEP or mail a CD? The civil engineering industry as a whole is still very paper based as well. Paper copies are signed and sealed by hand and sent in copies out to clients/bidders. Having to spend time printing everything gets extremely time and resource consuming. The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept. There are pushes in the right direction, but change is slow and many don't see the incentive of upending entire systems even though they can provide a real benefit.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago

PaulHoule 10y ago

No communication networks -- people in underserved areas are crying out for fiber or anything better than DSL. It's not clear anybody really wants more electric lines or pipelines but very clear that people want better internet.

maxerickson 10y ago
I don't know what the situation is now but a few years ago I couldn't get DSL (too many feet) while I watched them bury fiber about 2.5 miles away (the fiber was adding capacity to the nearby town). So at such a grand scale, a fiber map probably wouldn't really show many of the under-served areas. I was using 3g, I bet 4g is currently the best option.
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  4g can be a good option, but in many places in the U.S. there are hills and trees in the way. For instance the "Appalachin Mountains" region is where wireless goes to die.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    To an incredible degree, too. The Sprint commercials about basically being the same are true almost everywhere I've been in the past few years, so I've been using project Fi (Google's service) for a while. But every time I travel back to VA, I'm thrown back into a world of hunting for signal that I'd almost forgotten.
  - douche 10y ago
    It's really bizarre. Where my parents live, I can be almost line-of-sight to a cell-tower operated by my carrier (literally visible across the valley, two miles away), and I get barely two bars, with calls flaking out constantly. And forget about data.
    - hydrogen18 10y ago
      Just because you can see the tower doesn't mean the antennas are pointed in your direction. Furthermore, signal doesn't mean jack. I have a great 'LTE' signal all over where I live in Austin but only get about 0.25 mbps of download speed.

bikamonki 10y ago

Wait! You are missing Central America, South America, Mexico and Canada. Either that or you have the wrong title :)

tn13 10y ago

I am a road enthusiast. I have driven on almost every single major road in CA Nevada and especially the deserted "no one goes there" type roads. I also take interest in history of roads. California has been sitting ducks on some really important road proposals or last so many years despite the deaths they have been causing. My suspicion is that politicians want to push trains and other larger projects where they might get kickbacks instead of upgrading existing roads. Here are some observations: 1. Highway 1 seems to be under repair all the year for last 3 years. 2. Highway 152 is the only major road that connects SJ with I-5. despite this it is one lane for a large part. It has very high fatality and traffic jam rate. Decades have passed since government planned to broaden it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_152 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_152] 3. Panoche road. Not sure why this road exists. But since it does then making it an expressway could have helped create an alternative to 152 reducing traffic and accidents. 4. Then there is Route 130 that connections bay area to I-5. Several times it was proposed that this route be widened as an alternative to 152 but it never went ahead. I once saw a car fall several feet below the road just because he got spooked to see me coming in opposite direction. It is that desolated.

_delirium 10y ago
Every part of CA I've lived in has had a ton of money going into constant road construction, so this isn't quite my impression. The state's budget in this area is huge, in the billions annually. When I lived in L.A., they built an entire new, 6-lane freeway near where I lived. To relieve congestion on the 10, they just built a second parallel freeway, the 210, that doubled up the route! L.A. has so many freeways now that you can just treat them as arterial roads. If you miss your freeway interchange, no need to backtrack, just keep going and take the next freeway. I also lived for some years south of SF, and from that vantage point it seemed like a ton of money was being put into roads too. Highway 17 (San Jose to Santa Cruz) has had hundreds of millions poured into widening and safety upgrades. There was just a few years ago a major tunnel-boring project on Highway 1 to replace the "Devil's slide" portion between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay with new tubes put right through the mountain. And the continual freeway-ification of US-101 south of Gilroy has had money going into it just about every year. And heck, although much of it dates back a bit earlier, the Valley is the only place I've ever lived that has not only the normal three tiers of: interstate freeways, U.S. expressways, and state expressways, but also county expressways, like Montague Expressway and San Tomas Expressway. And yet doesn't have even halfway decent public transit (Caltrain barely counts).

deegles 10y ago

Fascinating to see how closely coal and natural gas map to states that went red in the election vs. all the renewables in blue states. Here's a map: http://www.270towin.com/ http://www.270towin.com/

_delirium 10y ago

As an addendum to the two maps here showing freight tonnage by rail and water route, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics has a nice one that overlays rail/water/truck tonnage on one map: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/transportation_in_the_united_states_2013/moving_goods.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

fjarlq 10y ago

In case lazarogamio is still reading comments here, some feedback: I have mild red-green color blindness (deuteranopia), which I think is why I'm having trouble reading a couple of the maps. For example, I can't distinguish the bridges in need of repair from the rest of the bridges. The pipelines map is also pretty difficult to read. Better color choices, and high-resolution images, would be much appreciated. Thanks!

lazarogamio 10y ago
I'm still reading :) Sorry for this, I'll look into something to make this easier for you in the article. In the meanwhile, we published some high-res versions of the maps on reddit, which hopefully are better for you. Electric grid: https://i.redd.it/2nkdq2bx101y.jpg https://i.redd.it/2nkdq2bx101y.jpg Pipelines: https://i.redd.it/mu945myovz0y.jpg https://i.redd.it/mu945myovz0y.jpg Airports: https://i.redd.it/m9p0mpy2wz0y.jpg https://i.redd.it/m9p0mpy2wz0y.jpg Ports: https://i.redd.it/2khvrwe6201y.jpg https://i.redd.it/2khvrwe6201y.jpg Bridges: https://i.redd.it/enf1rtz9z21y.jpg https://i.redd.it/enf1rtz9z21y.jpg
- fjarlq 10y ago
  Awesome, thank you!

njwi332 10y ago

If anyone is interested in infrastructure, I highly recommend "On the Grid" (https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Average-Neighborhood-Systems-World/dp/1609611381 https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Average-Neighborhood-Systems-Wor...) Excellent book that goes over all the systems making up a city. I read it a couple of years ago but off the top of my head, it covers electricity, telecommunications, roads, public transport, three water systems (freshwater, sewage, rainwater) and how they are all interconnected.

known 10y ago

Curious to know the infrastructure before 1970

DrScump 10y ago

Am I the only one who fears that these maps would be useful to terrorists?

douche 10y ago
Most of this information you could pick up from a good set of gas station maps.
SapphireSun 10y ago
Think about the implications of making the locations of these sites secret in a free society. Would the existence of plants be hidden from locals? Should it be illegal to talk about aggregations of plants and debate them? If the existence of the plants is too dangerous for civil discourse, maybe we shouldn't have them at all, to play devil's advocate.
logfromblammo 10y ago
They would be useful to terrorists. But they are more useful to people with peaceful purposes, by several orders of magnitude. Any use that a terrorist could find for them can also be found by a security auditor role-playing as an attacker. If a terrorist could find a weak point in the infrastructure that may be exploited, so too may a defender, who may then devise a countermeasure, rather than an attack plan. Those countermeasures would not necessarily appear on the maps. For instance, there may be a motion-sensing surveillance camera watching a locked gate on an access road to a reservoir for a municipal water supply. Such measures are sufficient to foil impulsive attacks, and planned attacks very often generate suspicious activity reports and probable cause for investigations well in advance of the planned event. In theory, the maps may be a security risk. In practice, they cannot substitute for in-person investigation of specific sites, and most important infrastructure elements are at least partially protected against impulse crimes and accidental damage by chain-link fences, concrete barriers, motion sensors, and cameras. The typical terrorist candidate doesn't have satellite-guided ICBMs--they have to actually go to something in order to attack it. And they are constrained by the need for their attacks to be significant, public, and obvious.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ceejay 10y ago

It's probably an apples to oranges comparison, but the image of America's electric grid looks like the prototypical "disaster" scenario when you're a new hire and walk into a train wreck of a server room that's been ignored or half-heartedly managed for years :)

maxerickson 10y ago
It seems they may have pulled the power line information from OpenStreetMap. If that is the case, it's partly the data that is messy and incomplete. As far as apples and oranges, I think that's right, 2 lines dozens of miles long crossing in the middle of nowhere is no problem at all.

donutz 10y ago

Ever driven through any of California's oil fields? Drive through someplace like Taft, and you'll see that the number of pipes just there on the property probably dwarf the amount of pipes moving that oil across the country.

euyyn 10y ago

I first thought all those aligned bridges were following the course of rivers. But it seems that most of them just cross over railways! Compare: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/img/bridges-1480.jpg?c=400 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-ame... (bridges) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/img/rails-1480.jpg?c=348 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-ame... (railways).