
Roads to Rome - mbostock
http://roadstorome.moovellab.com/
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frobozz
There are some interesting oddnesses here:

Vatican can't really "experience huge spatial growth" from this experiment. It
is surrounded by Rome. Traffic from any origin point will reach Rome before it
reaches The Holy See. I understand that this has probably happened because the
calculation is to a specific "centre of the city" point, which means that any
traffic entering Rome from the Westish will hit Vatican first.

Looking at the interactive map is fun.

For some reason, it's faster to get to Paris from Hemel Hempstead that it is
to get to London. And the opposite is true of Pont-l'Évêque. I originally
wondered if this was calculated using active traffic data, and a couple of
particularly bad traffic jams might have skewed the results.

But then I looked for others: Montreuil to Brussels is very odd, as is the
strange case of travellers from the Faroe Islands driving through Denmark,
Germany and the Netherlands, before reaching their nearest capital in
Brussels.

The oddest example of this is that travellers from half of Apulia find it
quicker to drive straight past San Marino, Ljubljana and Zagreb, before
reaching Sarajevo.

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LeifCarrotson
I think they have some bugs: it also claims it's faster to drive from
Milwaukee, WI to Lansing, MI than the adjacent Madison, WI. Furthermore, there
is a section of I90, a Madison ring road, which Google Maps claims is 15
minutes from Madison city center and 5+ hours from Lansing, while this map
claims it's closer to Lansing. There are similar tendrils of I196 through
Holland, MI and I to Grand Rapids, MI that go to Madison (5+ hours) instead of
Lansing (1-2 hours).

Or maybe we're reading the map wrong? You can get to each capital any number
of potentially shorter ways, but almost any location in Michigan routed to
Madison will take 196, while only a few from that spot going Lansing will take
that road...

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paganel
Great idea and pretty cool execution, with the only caveat that the
interactive maps don't work on my FF browser, it shows a blank page. If anyone
involved with the project sees this comment, I'm using Firefox version 41.0.2,
on Mac OSX.

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karussell
BTW: how are duplicates normally handled on hacker news? This - 5 dups for
this - looks odd
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rome%20roads&type=story&sort=b...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rome%20roads&type=story&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth)

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Kiro
I don't get this. Don't all roads lead to all non-isolated cities?

~~~
dbyte
It is a famous idiom, hence the pun:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_roads_lead_to_Rome](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_roads_lead_to_Rome)

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Kartificial
Very cool maps indeed, would love to have this on my wall sometime.

