条条大路通罗马--地理可视化

条条大路通罗马--地理可视化

     我们知道条条大路通罗马，怎么绘制通罗马的路呢？

     请看下文介绍（交互式效果见图http://roadstorome.moovellab.com/maps/roads-to-rome/#3/54.45/21.67）。

At least for Europe it is obvious: All roads lead to Rome! You can reach the eternal city on almost 500.000 routes from all across the continent. Which road would you take?

To approach one of the biggest unsolved quests of mobility, the first question we asked ourselves was: Where do you start, when you want to know every road to Rome? We aligned starting points in a 26.503.452 km² grid covering all of Europe. Every cell of this grid contains the starting point to one of our journeys to Rome.

Now that we have our 486.713 starting points we need to find out how we could reach Rome as our destination. For this we created a algorithm that calculates one route for every trip. The more often a single street segment is used, the stronger it is drawn on the map. The maps as outcome of this project is somewhere between information visualization and data art, unveiling mobility and a very large scale.

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Roads to Rome

Now that we have our 486.713 starting points we need to find out how we could reach Rome as our destination. For this we created an algorithm that calculates one route leading to Rome, Italy for every starting point in Europe. The more often a single street segment is used, the stronger it is drawn on the map.

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Roads to Romes (US)

Maybe all roads lead to Rome, because there is a Rome on every continent? During further research we found out that there actually is a city called Rome (or Roma) on every continent of the world. The United States of America actually have 9 cities named after the Italian capital.

Following this fact, we adjusted our routing to find the closest Rome to every location in the USA. Each color represents routes leading to the closest Rome of this very starting point. Adjusting and coloring the routing to multiple destinations resulted in a very interesting territorial picture. Thus, every location is connected to the nearest Rome according to fastest travel time.

As we know the melting pot is the home of many Americans who centuries ago migrated from Europe. Needless to say, that cities with the name of Rome must have something to do with Italy. 

A way of interpreting the spatial pattern of Romes in the United States is looking at migration statistics from the settlement of the new world - especially these immigrants originating from Italy. The map "Besiedlungsgang in den USA" gives a great reference to when, where to and from where European settelers came to the United States. 

You might have seen an earlier version of this map showing 10 Romes in the United States. This turned out to be a mistake in our data prcessing. We assumed that this was a city located on the border of two states just like Ulm and Neu-Ulm in Germany. Thanks to an attentive user we've double checked and found that there are actually only 9 Romes - sorry. To find all routes to the 9 Romes of the United States our algorithm calculated about two hours and found 312.719 routes.

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New United States (Roads to State Capitals)

Following the thought of shortest travel times from any given location, the next step of our mobility quest leads to the capital city of each state in the USA. What territory does each capital cover by shortest travel time? What is the place most remote place to the state capital? What kind of road networks are vizualized in different parts of the country?

When looking only at service areas, it seems like many states keep their territorial extents. Especially the coast states are recognizable. The southern states seem to lose their original form.

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New Europe (Roads to European Capitals)

Realigning territories by travel time also works in Europe. "New Europe" shows big changes to the political borders as we know them today - assuming they corresponded with travel-time zones (country capitals).

Some countries stay more or less the same, like Turkey, the UK, Denmark, Spain and Portugal. While tiny states like Andorra, Lichtenstein, Vatican and Monaco experience huge spatial growth. Showing the importance of their infrastructural inclusion. 

Looking at the states of central Europe it can get very hard to recognize any of the known political borders. Especially Germany, Switzerland and Italy amongst many others seem to lose their caracteristical borders.

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Roads to Paris and Berlin

What hapens if we change the saying to all roads to Paris or Berlin? Walking down the political road, we tried to find out if our mappings could reveal the political structure of a country. We chose to compare Germany and France.

This time all routes lead to the respective capital of a single country, resulting in different spatial arrangements of the most important roads used. Assuming everybody in France and Germany decided to travel to their nations capital city, the location of traffic jams are obvious!