A native Houstonian has set up a one-man bicycle-messenger service, reports Culturemap’s Whitney Radley: Within an hour, Clutch Delivery’s Liam Musgrave will pedal to your place almost anything — except dry cleaning, pets, and “illicit substances.” This map shows his service area, extending west out to the Loop and east to Lockwood.
What’s the state of Houston? It’s right here: Fake is the New Real’s Neil Freeman redrew the 50 states, dividing them into parcels of about 6.2 million people so as to distribute electoral college votes more equally. The Lone Star State, this hypothetical map shows, has to be broken up. You’ve got Big Thicket in the middle, with Trinity, comprising Dallas and Fort Worth, tucked inside. Chinati expands up to El Paso along the Rio Grande. And you knew it had to be true: Houston stands alone.
You can see the new 50 states after the jump:
Extracted from a national map by datavisualization wiz John Nelson, here’s a map of Texas showing where votes for Romney and Obama came from, plotted point by point, by county. Using data from the Politico website, Nelson plotted a red dot for every 100 Romney votes and a light blue dot for every 100 Obama votes. Clumped purple masses fill the counties that envelop the state’s major metropolises.
Nelson tells future-fan website io9 that more typical red-blue political maps accentuate geographically large but population-light areas. “This method avoids the geo-social visual bias of large geographic areas having small populations overwhelming the overall picture. In this way both the relative volume and geographic distribution are apparent, as well as the partisan proportions throughout,” Nelson wrote of his national map, pictured here:
Note: Story updated below.
Yesterday, Apple released a new version of its operating system for late-model iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, just 2 days in advance of the scheduled appearance of the company’s new flagship, the iPhone 5. A Swamplot reader who took the plunge immediately and upgraded his iPad to iOS6 has been enjoying tours of Houston within the included brand-new built-in Maps application, which in the updated operating system is built by Apple instead of Google. “Notice anything odd about these maps?” the reader asks.
Just a few things so far, the reader answers for us. F’rinstance, a mysterious “City Tubercular Hospital” appears to have alighted on the vacant block west of Dunlavy off Allen Parkway where a portion of the Allen House Apartments used to stand. A large chunk of the Regent Square mixed-use development has been planned for that location since 2008.
Art galleries that are within sight and walking distance of other art galleries might do better than standalone spaces, guesses blogger Robert Boyd after mapping the somewhat clustered Inner Loop locations of Houston’s 9 art-gallery clusters (above): “Since I started this blog, none of the institutions in clusters have shut their doors except for Joan Wich’s gallery, which died when she did. But isolated, non-clustered institutions have had problems.” Call it Houston’s might-as-well effect: “Visiting an art gallery or museum generally requires someone drive (or bike) to it–to make a dedicated trip, in other words. But if there is a second gallery there, the marginal effort required to visit the second art space is practically nil. Might as well, right?”
Map: Robert Boyd
THE NEW ONLINE HOME OF HOUSTON’S MAP TOP TEN 
Zip Code maps, super neighborhood maps, crime maps, city boundary maps — if there’s a city-produced map of Houston you’re looking for, you’ll find it at the planning dept.’s just-unveiled My City Maps and Apps page. The page is peppered with (mostly working) links to the city’s main GIS My City map viewer (newly updated with 2010 aerial photos) and other services such as the still-in-beta, still Internet-Explorer-only electronic Development Review Cycle system for tracking platting, variance, and development applications. [Planning Dept.]
Yes, those are some likely trucked-in late-fall tomatoes featured in the Houston Press‘s latest interactive map. Each marks the spot of one of the 15 current regular farmers markets in the greater Houston area.
Image: Monica Fuentes/Houston Press
National attention may be focused on Central Texas-style barbecue, but food writer J.C. Reid says it’s time to put Houston barbecue back on the map. Logical first step in his Houston Barbecue Project, then: this interactive map of urban BBQ joints within Beltway 8. The project’s mission: “to revisit, document and recognize the East Texas-style of barbecue as it is embodied in the urban barbecue joints of Houston, Texas.” Reid drew the Beltway boundary just to limit the project’s first phase — he’s writes that he’s interested in expanding exploration to Houston’s outskirts and beyond once he — and any fellow BBQ adventurers — are able to document more of this city’s smoky inner sanctum.
What about the argument that city of Houston health and environmental codes are incompatible with good barbecue?
Over at the Houston Press, food critic Katharine Shilcutt and chief mapmaker Monica Fuentes have traced the history of locally owned restaurants on the stretch of Lower Westheimer from east of Taft all the way to Dunlavy way, way back — to the long-ago days of 1997. Sure, the sequence of maps (see below for the latest) leaves out bars, coffee shops, and fast-food joints, but culinary additions are color-coded (after the start date) by year of appearance. Featured appearances between now and next year: Underbelly, the Hay Merchant, Uchi, and L’Olivier. Your guide to eating the strip and curve:
Do you know the way from Cassoulet to Jalapeño Gefilte Fish? With this handy map, navigating your multiple-course progressive dinner-about-town should be no problem. It’s former Houston Press food critic Robb Walsh’s 100 favorite restaurant dishes in Houston, conveniently laid out on a navigable Google map by Press reader Kyle Nielsen. Yep, Fried Mojarra at Taqueria Jesus Maria (#95), Kubideh and Zereshk Polo at Kasra Persian Grill (#89), Frito Pie at the Rio Verde Taco Truck (#50), Chocolate-Peanut Butter Cake Ball at Coffee Groundz (#94) — they’re all here, glistening bits of fat and all. We’re counting 44 dishes inside the Loop, the rest in the great beyond. Not included on account of them being all over the place: the Whataburger Triple Meat, Triple Cheese with Bacon and Jalapeños (#59) and James Coney Island Chili (#80). Burp.
Earlier this week, Google greatly expanded the areas covered by its Street View feature. The expansion means street views in areas way outside of Houston and its surrounding areas are now viewable from within Google Maps. In fact, Google’s new coverage map indicates that pretty much all of Texas (or at least areas near its major roads and highways) now has navigable street images available, excepting a few patches here and there and a couple of wide swaths of land near El Paso.
What about the rest of the country? Oh, there’s some expanded coverage out there too:
Having trouble finding photos of your Iked house on Flickr? Try finding it from the air, using NOAA’s brand-new aerial photos, taken only a few days after Hurricane Ike.
Aerial photo of Villa Dr. in Seabrook after Hurricane Ike: NOAA
Here’s a tool likely to be useful to armchair developers interested in the lay of the land. PolicyMap is a new GIS website that allows you to view a range of local market and demographic data for Houston or any area of the country. You can see how local crime statistics, an interesting array of mortgage categories (such as the percentage of piggyback, subprime, and refi loans), income distributions, and even donations to presidential candidates look on a map. (Big surprise: Pearland and the Energy Corridor really like John McCain!)
PolicyMap is a project of The Reinvestment Fund, a non-profit community-development financial institution from Philadelphia. Some of the advanced features require a subscription, but there’s plenty to play around with for free.
The quick map above shows what Houston areas took out the most subprime loans in 2006. (The darkest purple means more than 50% of all mortgages funded that year.) If you discover more interesting neighborhood stories demonstrated nicely in PolicyMap maps, share your finds in the comments.
Google has just added street-level photos to the driving directions available on Google Maps. This means — if you’re headed through an area covered by Google’s Street View — you can now use photographs of each intersection to guide your journey, with helpful arrows superimposed to show your path.
Though the areas covered by Street View in Houston were recently expanded, most inside-the-Loop neighborhoods are still not covered. Let’s say you’re at the new Pagoda Vietnamese restaurant near Cottage Grove, trying to find your way to Chinatown — you know, that neighborhood on Bellaire in southwest Houston, where all those Vietnamese restaurants are. If you plot your trip using Google maps, the directions won’t show photos of your first few turns. From I-10 on, though, you get preview photographs of every intersection. And you can pan and zoom around them, as if looking for oncoming traffic.
After the jump: A video from Google, showing how Street View directions work . . . and what they’re good for.
Microsoft has updated its Live Search Maps with a number of new features, the most striking of which is the ability to view a street-map overlay on the maps’ signature 3D aerial views. This should be especially helpful to the armchair pilots among you who have been flying blind through Microsoft’s “bird’s eye” views, trying to figure which street is which as you rotate around a property.
Since HAR’s recent update, Live Search Maps are now linked directly to property listings. However, those maps do not include the new street-highlighting feature. To see this new feature, go to maps.live.com and enter an address, then click on the “Bird’s eye” button at the top. Street highlighting automatically appears, but you can turn it off by clicking on the button at the top marked “Labels.” As before, you can rotate the direction of your view by clicking on the N, S, E, or W in the top left corner.
Now here’s a problem: What happens when the newly highlighted streets run behind a tall building? As our sample image above shows, they don’t just run — they dash!
After the jump: How to avoid traffic online!
