All the streets of America

Generate your own map of every street in America, inspired by Fathom's All streets poster.

First run:

npm install

You might have to install cairo, if you haven't already. See the instructions on node-canvas project page.

You might also need to install the ogr2gr2 and topojson command line utilities. (ogr2ogr is included in the gdal package.) Checkout Mike Bostock's Let's make a map for more details.

brew install gdal

npm install -g topojson

Next, run

node download.js

To download the data for the US Census website and run ogr2gr as well as convert the geojson files to topojson. Grab coffee. It's going to take a while (1-2 hours on my macbook air).

Now you can run

node draw.js

Which will generate the image and save it to out/out.png. Feel free to modify the draw.js script to your liking. This should take about 10-20 minutes at the default resolution.

After creating this library, I came across Mike Bostock's similar project to visualize all the rivers of the US as well as Casey Thomas's project to visualize all the US roads.