What happens when you set out driving around in the summer and are thinking of an idea for a map? Well, naturally, as you approach the ever familiar golden arches you think to yourself…how about creating a map showing the closeness to your local McDonalds!
That’s basically how this way cool map was inspired – enter The contiguous United States, visualized by distance to the nearest McDonald’s.
The map shows some interesting spatial patterns like, East of the Mississippi if you crave a Big Mac then your in luck and likely don’t have to look to far, likewise, while on a major highway you likely won’t have to look to far to grab a Filet of Fish, however, as you head west you may have to log a few more miles before you have a chance to dip some McNuggets in your favorite sauce! Definitely an enjoyable mapping experiment and a pretty cool map as well! See the weather sealed blog for more details info on the McMapping Project {What I found cool was how the author managed to access the McDonlads geocoded dataset of 13,000+ location from http://www.aggdata.com/-nice!}
For more about the AggData service see this post