refractal

Ben Fry, a data visualization artist and teacher, compiled the above image of the US. As he describes it,

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.

While not terribly profound, it is an interesting inversion: geography as an emergent property of infrastructure. Fry mentions elsewhere that one of the reasons he omitted Hawaii and Alaska was because this relationship is not visible.

I rather like looking at a crop of the image, and watching these nameless towns become nodes in a web traced out by roadways, looking almost like bacterial cultures. It is almost like looking up into the sky and seeing all the different stars, some bright, some dim, wondering what those worlds must be like.

Project website with higher resolution close ups

Fry’s commentary and sketch of the technical process involved