Cambridge Streets

A few years ago, Ben Fry at Fathom created a map of the US based entirely on roads.  Nothing else, just roads.  He called it All Streets.  I remember seeing it at the time, thinking it was interesting and wondering what a UK version would look like.  Of course then various things happened and I forgot all about it.  I was reminded of it again earlier this month by a post from Jim Vallandingham that mentioned his own version of Gregor Aisch's Berlin specific version of All Streets, using TileMill.  It seemed very straightforward so I thought I'd have a go myself and create a similar map of Cambridge.

I grabbed a shape file for Cambridgeshire from Geofabrik (which takes Open Street Map data) and following Jim's very clear instructions ended up with this:

You can find the full size .png version on Flickr

I've emphasised the main roads by using a darker colour and thicker line, so the 'skeleton' of the city with links to the A14 running east/west and the M11 running north/south stands out very clearly.  The density of housing in the Kings Hedges area (northern of the centre) is also quite apparent.

You can also see other nice features that you might miss on other maps.  There are several carparks around the edge of the city:

It turns out they are park and ride stops.  There are 5 of these around the edge of the city and all close to the major routes in and out.

The next challenge is to create a detailed road-only map of the whole country.  I've generated the image below (which includes Ireland), but exporting this as a svg file seems beyond TileMill at the moment.