Traffic Stinks

As I was making my ridiculous hour long drive to school which is only about 20 miles from my house I was wondering which is worse San Antonio traffic or Houston's (I have lived in the Houston area most of my life). And decided this a job for....URBAN GEOGRAPHY!!!! I became ambitious, and decided why stop there? Let's compare San Antonio and Houston and also laugh at the top 5 worst traffic cities in the U.S. and be glad we don't live there.

I decided to take screenshots of the traffic map for all the cities at around 4:30-5:00pm, that's when I find traffic is the worst. 

San Antonio 

San Antonio is a radial city, consisting of two loops with highways and interstates forming a spider web like pattern.The problem spots seem to be the 1604(outer loop)/I-10 intersection, the 1-10 to 410 (inner loop) West ramp and just I-35 in general especially where it meets 1604. The issue with the outer loop where it meets I-10 on the Northwest side of the city is that there is a stretch of 1604 in which the highway is only two lanes and there are several intersections with stop lights this creates a severe backlog. The 410 entrance ramp in the west central section is backed up most of the time but this bottleneck moves quickly and has nothing on I-35. This freeway has been under construction for the entire 3 years I have lived here. Of course, I said the same thing about another road and was corrected. Apparently it had only been under construction for a few months, then again it was an 8 year old who said this so I don't know who is more reliable me or him. 

Houston- also a radial city

I have lived in the city of Houston for most of my life and now that I'm looking at the maps it's completely obvious that Houston is worse. The thing about Houston is many people work downtown and live in the suburbs, so at about 5 o'clock every day there is a mass exodus out of the inner city. The inner loop, which at some points is only two lanes, is the way most people get to the highways that lead to the outer city. This creates massive congestion, the outer loop is an alternative but that gets backed up as well. Sidenote: the outer loop is a toll road. My best Houston traffic story is when I was trying to get from Sugar Land which is Southwest and I was trying to get to South Central Houston I left around 7 and arrived around 9. They closed highway 59, now I-69, down to one lane and delayed me 2 hours. Yay. 

Now that we have covered my two Texas towns let's look at the worst traffic cities in the U.S. different websites rate these cities in different orders so I decided to put them in order of hours wasted a year in traffic. 

#1 Los Angeles 

Hours Lost Annually: 64 Hours

The city of dreams, disappointments, and apparently bumper to bumper traffic. 

#2 Honolulu

Hours Lost Annually: 60 

I guess when you only have one major road....

#3 San Francisco 

Hours Lost Annually: 56

Another victim of the one major highway epidemic.

#4 New York

Hours Lost Annually: 53

Just...no. 

Seriously, do you see all those yellow caution triangles?!?

#5 Austin 

Hours Lost Annually: 41

I have been in this dark red death trap and barely made it out alive, but really though we were rear ended. 

#6 Washington D.C.

Hours Lost Annually: 40

I have also been in this trap and it was not fun.

Now we know to avoid rush hour and if you cant avoid rush hour use your handy dandy traffic map and drive past all the other suckers who didn't.

Bonus points if you noticed my Legend of Zelda walkthrough tab in all the screenshots. Yeah I was rocking that N64!

Sources: 

Google Maps

Forbes.com

Finding an Apartment Using GIS Part 2

Yesterday I posted about how I narrowed my apartment search to smaller list using GIS techniques. If you have not read that one I highly suggest going back and reading Part 1 first.

I have my list but now there is another factor I want to include. I just received an offer for a part time job at PretendJob Inc. and I want my new home to be close to both the job location and to my school. I can use the same radius tool for this but now I have two, hopefully, overlapping circles instead of only one. The purple triangle represent my work and the blue dot is school, because I will be at school more than the job I made the circle for work bigger because I am willing to live farther from work than I am for school. 

Now I can see what apartments are within the two locations.

On the previous post I located the shuttle stops and what locations are within walking distance but the map I had was zoomed in on a 5 mile radius of the University. There were actually other shuttle stops farther than that 5 mile distance and I want to include those in my selection, who cares how far camus is if you have a shuttle! Had I not plotted all the shuttle stops I might have missed this cluster of apartments. 

Another scenario is if I wasn't looking for a apartment but a house. Since I can't simply google search "houses for sale", at least I don't think I can, I would narrow down the neighborhoods and look for houses either by driving around or searching real estate sites. I first outlined the residential area, then I will use similar tactics as before. This time instead of using a radial outline of something I want to be close to I will use it for something I don't want to be near. Let's pretend I am a terrible person and I hate children, dogs, and happiness in general. I don't want to live near a park or school, so I made a border around all the schools and parks and whatever is left is where I might like to live.

Now I know what areas to not look for a home if I was heartless. But in all reality school zones are quite annoying.

You can use these techniques for anything like the nearest grocery store or what school you want to go to (if you have options), in any city not just San Marcos. I had fun just messing around with the dry erase markers and plastic!

Where does your food come from?

I was reading my monthly National Geographic and found that they are starting a new eight month long exposition on food, and how we, as a planet, plan on feeding what will be 9 billion people in 2050.This sounded really far in the future until basic math reminded me that it is only 35 years away. What really snatched my attention though is when the article was talking about where our crops go. Even though we have a ton of farm land in the United States hardly any of those crops go to the supermarket. If the information in this article is correct, not that I have any reason to think otherwise, then our crops go to feeding livestock and/or biofuels. The United States is the world's largest producer, with China right behind, of corn which mainly goes to feeding livestock, the reason being is that we are a meat devouring society. India had the highest percentage for crops grown to be consumed by humans this being because Indians eat more rice and vegetables than the western world.

Purple is crops for fuel or livestock feed and green

represents human consumption.           Source: National Geographic

 So where do we get our food? The grocery store gets their produce from a wholesaler who gets it from a manufacturer who gets the food from a broker who gets the crop from a farmer. That's a long way for some apples. Also, technically "local" farms can be as far as 400 miles away from their market and only twelve states account for half of all farmers markets in the U.S, California being number one. If you look at any of the fruit in the grocery store it is probably from a South American country and vegetables are probably from Mexico. 

Honestly pasture or grass fed beef and pork is immensely healthier not only for the animals but for us too. If we switched from producing a monocrop of corn for feed to raising better livestock and a greater variety of produce, along with a more grain, fruit, and vegetable based diet, maybe our ecological footprint due to agriculture, which is the largest consumer of water and producer waste, would be reduced as well as our waistline. 

How Americans See Europe

Source: Enchanted Learnin

One of my favorite time wasting websites, BuzzFeed, had a humorous post about Americans trying to label a map of Europe. And as funny as some of the maps were one person labeled England as Benedict Cumberbatch's House, another labeled Hungary as Middle Earth, and another labeled Portugal as Spain's Butt. Most left a lot spaces blank and some put the same county name in multiple spots.


Source: Buzz Feed

This video was painful....

As funny as this is it does raise an issue I believe should be taken more seriously. Some of these people wrote on their maps "I went to college!" or "I have my Masters". We now have a global economy and as technology increases the world becomes smaller. Today's high school graduates will have to compete with other kids from China, India, and Europe. America is one of the very few countries that most people only speak one language. Other countries are fluent in at least two if not three or four languages. Americans except everyone else to not only learn English but be completely fluent. If we as Americans expect to be taken seriously we need to brush up on our world history/geography. I know when I was in public school any mention of history that did not solely include the United States was not addressed until my junior year in high school and even then it was brief. Our news coverage is only global when it may directly affect us. The recent issues with the Ukraine only became mainstream when the U.S. government threatened to intervene. Our stance, as the public, on global issues would be greatly more intellectual if we knew where maybe half the European countries were located.

Oh in case you were wondering....

Finding an Apartment using GIS Part 1

For those who do not know, GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is a convenient way of saying putting several layers of maps on top of each other to make one detailed map. If you have used Google Maps you have used GIS. Even my earlier post about traffic maps was GIS, putting a layer of traffic severity on top of another layer including streets counts as GIS.

I am transferring from UTSA to Texas State next semester and I am looking for a new apartment in San Marcos, TX. Apartment search websites are great but because apartments have to pay to be on those websites it is not all encompassing. Yet, if you do a Google search for apartments it is overwhelming. How can one solve this problem? Da-da-da-dah! G-I-S!!!

Assuming that most people do not have the specialized software on their computer needed for GIS, I am going to do it by hand. So here are the supplies I need:

Clear Sheet Protectors (I used expandable ones because I thought it would work better but regular ones would be fine)

Dry Erase Markers (variety of colors)
String
Printer
Google Maps


Ok, so first I printed a map of the San Marcos area. I decided I wanted to live fairly close to campus so putting the printed map in the plastic sleeve I took a dry erase marker and string measured about 5 miles using the scale bare on the bottom of the map, in this case 5 miles equaled about 2 and a half inches. I attached the string to the marker and drew a circle, or a radius, of where I generally wanted to live. The blue dot is the center of campus and that was my base point.

Next, I printed a more focused map of San Marcos this time I did a search for apartments so all the apartments in the area will be represented by red dots. I also decided I do not want to buy a parking permit so I want to live in a place really close to a shuttle stop (Texas State has a shuttle system that serves the surrounding area). The Texas State website has a map of the shuttle routes but I want to compare that map directly to my map of apartments. Using a blue dry erase marker I notated the shuttle stops onto the plastic covered map of apartments in my radius. 

The blue dots represent shuttle stops and as I said previously the red dots represent apartment complexes. Now, what I will do is put this map, with the plastic sleeve still on, into another plastic sleeve (this is why I bought the expandable ones). Now I can draw on top of the shuttle map without effecting the original map or the map with just the dots. I drew circles around the shuttle stops, just like I did in the beginning with the whole city, only this time they will be smaller. I cleaned them up a bit so the lines do not overlap and now it looks like this:

My circles were just hand drawn, I did not use the string because they were so small. If I were using the computer software I could be really exact, down to the foot. Any red dot within the blue circles are a possibility and I can ignore the others. 

Now instead of a giant spread of a ton of apartments I have it narrowed down to about 25 and I have not even looked at floorplans, price, or anything like that. This list is narrowed down simply by geography! In the next post I will go further and explain more of what I can do with this but for now I have a manageable list of possible living situations.

Sources: 

Google Maps

www.shuttle.txstate.edu

Unnusal Pets and Where They are From

I was reading a magazine article about exotic pets and how some Americans own tigers, primates, and kangaroos! The article brought up the ethics of owning such pets and could the owners give them as good of a life in captivity as in the wild, I wondered about less exotic pets that many people own. After some research I came up with small list of popular "unusual" pets, where they come from how they live in the wild.

1) Hedgehogs
I was particularly interested in hedgehogs because I have thought about owning one before. They are undoubtable cute and after all who could resist owning your very own Sonic the Hedgehog?

Origin/ Natural Environment 

Most domestic hedgehogs are a Sub-saharian African breed and like dry grassy areas. They cannot live with temperatures below 72 degrees. Also, they like to live in burrows but do not create their own holes. They take on the abandoned holes of other critters. Hedgehogs can travel up to 5 miles a night, are nocturnal, and hibernate. 

Source: National Geographic Kids

This map shows all hedgehog breeds including the African breed. 

2) Macaws

Source: National Geographic

These gorgeous birds are very popular to own due to their brilliant colors, however they are an endangered species and some variations are even extinct. It is important, therefore, that pets are bred and not captured from the wild. Sidenote: I think the new kid's movie Rio is about a macaw. 

Origin/Natural Environment

Macaws are mostly found in South America and Central America in a rainforest habitat. Their bright colors fit in with the brightly colored fruit and vegetation. Macaws live in the higher levels of the forest canopy and are used to temperatures no lower than 64 degrees. The birds eat mostly fruit and nuts. Fun fact, they lick clay walls in the wild to increase their sodium intake. 

Source: National Geographic

Side Note: I went to Honduras, which is in Central America, a few years ago and I could not help but include this picture. I was at the Mayan ruins and there were a few Macaws there.

Source: Jane Goodall Institute

3) Chimpanzees

Our closest animal relative is also a popular pet. Their intelligence, use of tools, and dexterity is so fascinating that people keep them as pets and treat them like human children. Currently, I don't want any kind of child especially a hairy one. To each is own I guess. 

Origin/Natural Environment

The jungles of Africa is where chimps make their home in the wild. These jungles have thick vegetation and warm temperatures (no lower than 64 degrees). They spend most of their day foraging for food (insects, berries, and nuts). Sometimes they do eat smaller primates. 

Source: Lincoln Park Zoo

4) Ball Python

As Indiana Jones once said, "Snakes. I hate Snakes". The Ball Python is a popular pet because it is apparently docile compared to other snake species. I think you can even get these guys at Petsmart but considering they belong in the african jungle I think they can be classified as "unusual."

Source: Reptile Expert

Origin/ Natural Environment

This Python likes the savanna and grasslands of Africa which the climate only varies from 68-86 degrees. They eat small mammals like mice and squirrels (gross). They are non-venomous and do not pose a serious threat to humans. 

Sorry, I still think of this...

Source: Disney

If you are looking for something other than a typical dog or cat you may consider some of these unusual pets. Yes the "cool" factor is undeniable but keep in mind though that these are specialty pets and require a lot of care and special habitats to accommodate their needs. Owning an exotic pet is a commitment and a responsibility that is not to be taken lightly. People need to take into consideration the time and money that goes into taking care of these awesome animals that come from amazing places. Another way geography relates to everyday life, even pet ownership!

Sources:

hedgehogmanual.com

animals.nationalgeographic.com

lincolnparkzoo.com

reptileexpert.org

blueplanetbioms.org

Spatial Analysis of Baseball Fans

Link for the interactive map: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/24/upshot/facebook-baseball-map.html#6,35.214,-97.337
To view county percentage you have to zoom in a lot.

I don't typically read the NY Times but this post caught my attention. Combining two of my loves: maps and baseball this interactive map allows viewers to zero in on specific U.S. counties and find out who is loyal to what MLB team. Keep in mind the map was based on Facebook "likes" and may not represent every fan also it only includes U.S. teams so the Toronto Bluejays are not represented. I played around with it for a while, and this map was able to answer questions I would not have been able to answer without personally visiting the location and surveying hundreds of people! Here are some cool things I found:

1) The Yankees are America's Team.
What about the states that do not have MLB teams? Who do they follow? Well it seems that the Yankees are the default team. For states such as New Mexico, Montana South Carolina, Alaska, and Hawaii the overwhelming majority of fans are Yankee fans. Of course, the Yankees happen to be the most well known team and they are able to snag favorite players with their millions upon millions of dollars, so this makes perfect sense!

2) Illinois is losing their fans to St. Louis.
For having two teams (the White Sox and the Cubs) a lot of southern.. Illinoisians? Illinoisites? Illinois Residents are surprisingly Cardinal Fans. The Cardinals are doing relatively well this year, better than the Sox and Cubs this may be a possible explanation. Oh it could also be the fact that the Cardinals won the World Series in 2011, went to the league championship in 2012 and the 2013 World Series. Yeah that's probably it.

3) Texas is a Ranger state.

Had this map been made almost 10 years ago, Texas would have mostly been Houston Astros fans, but since the 2005 loss at the World Series the Astros haven't taken a pennant. The Rangers however, went to the World Series in 2011 and have been holding their own since, resulting in the domination of Texas baseball fans and the leaking of their fandom into the surrounding states. Now it seems only the Houston area bleeds vintage orange. 

4) State Lines don't matter.

I think it's super neat that the fans are not effected by state lines at all! The team colors have a radial pattern which means the biggest factor is not what city or state the team belongs to but distance from the home field. Your geography has a huge effect on what team you root for, we may not agree on what team to support but there is one thing I know: Baseball games are infinity better in person than on TV. So, whichever ballpark is the shortest drive is the one I'm going to go to.