When it absolutely, positively needs to have a map

Those people who know me personally already realize that I'm a big fan of cargo freight.  I have a extra-special fondness for shipping container freight, but I find air freight interesting too.  Add to this the simple fact that I've found a lot of FedEx related maps lately, and you get a post solely about FedEx.

FedEx is based out of Memphis, Tennessee, where it has its "superhub" at the Memphis International Airport.  It has a fleet of nearly 700 aircraft flying to almost 400 destinations.  And one extremely overwhelming distribution center.

The constant movement in these and other similar distribution centers are amazing.  Conveyor belts run everywhere, forklifts scuttle about, and you have to be on your toes that you don't get run over. These places are darn near hyperactive.

But on to the maps...

FedEx, with its famed overnight delivery service, runs 24-7. And with that 24-7 business, they have flights flying into their Memphis superhub and Indianapolis and Dallas regional hubs constantly. Here is a time lapse video of 25 hours of FedEx flights back and forth across in the continental US:, accompanied by a little acoustic Led Zeppelin.  Watch the timing of how almost all the planes are on the ground in Memphis at the same time to sync their delivery routes.

I find it a little ironic that a time lapse video of airplanes flying to Memphis is accompanied by Zeppelin singing a song entitled "Going to California", especially when there are both more appropriately titled groups and songs that mention flying into Memphis available.

It should be noted that this is Memphis, which is located in the South, where summer storms can wreak havoc on even the best run air traffic systems.  When storms develop, the orchestration of in-bound flights can look like a well-choreographed dance.

Part of FedEx's website has been devoted to demographic and sociological cartograms.  Cartograms are a different kind of map -- one where some variable, such as life expectancy or happiness rating or population, is substituted for land area in a map.  (For example, many people are familiar with cartograms from US Presidential elections.)

FedEx cartogram showing differences in R&D expenditures.

These cartograms on FedEx's site are some of the most dynamic collections of cartograms that I've seen in a long time. They display worldwide demographic data, usually three related topics at a time, morphing the world to show each set of data.  The data range over a wide range of topics as well -- from airline travel to mobile phone usage to coffee imports to education spending -- just to name a few. The demographics expressed within the project are fairly extensive and they are constantly adding more. 

Flip through them and you'll find a wealth of information.  The one drawback is that you need to hover over the unlabeled country to get specific information.  When the countries get distorted you may find yourself hovering over several likely candidates if you have a specific country you want to find.  But still, it's a wild method of displaying worldwide demographic differences.

One last comment about FedEx that appeals to the font geek in me.  Their logo is one of the most subtly creative logos currently in existence. The company created its own font in order to achieve a hidden extra something within the logo that adds to their brand.  See if you can find it.  If you can't, the answer can be found here.

Personal Maps

There are a lot of personal maps out there on the web devoted to where people have been, what people have done, where family lived in the past...  if you can map it and it's about you, that's a personal map.

Some of the most prolific personal maps are non-electronic and found on the backs of motor homes and RVs.These are typically maps of the United States and/or Canada and consist of a set of state or province-shaped stickers. 

The rules go like this: if you visit, drive through, or camp in a state, you get to put the decal on.  There is quite a debate among RV enthusiasts about whether you actually have to camp there (in your RV) to get the sticker or if you just have to drive through it. The debate is, from what I hear, a bit of a big deal.

The high-tech version of the RV decal collection was made popular by Facebook.

A "Where I've Been" app map.  Red = "lived there." Blue = "been there."

Facebook was one of the first to make personal maps both easily accessible and popular with the online "Where I've Been" app. Their initial app allowed you to create a map by checking a list of the states, provinces, and/or countries you've been to or lived in.

You can go crazy will the virtual pushpins with this version of "Where I've Been."

Later iterations allowed you to go into further detail about the cities you've been to, the places you've actually lived in, and the places you've merely wanted to visit.

Flightmemory.com is one of my favorites.  It's especially nice for people who fly quite a bit, since it won't stay static for years at a time.  It not only allows you to keep track of where you've been, but also what flight you were on, when it took off and landed, your satisfaction with the airline, if you flew for business or for personal reasons, which class you flew in, and whether you had a window, aisle, or center seat. The information you choose to enter is up to you.

The site logs all of the geographic information and creates a handy map.

There are single-country maps if you've flown domestically, and a world map if you've flown internationally. If you have intra-European flights, those are also given on a separate, zoomable map. 

You can also enter your flight ahead of when you book it.  Flightmemory keeps a real-time map of the users who are in the air at the time you check it.

Flightmemory users in the air at 0330GMT on 5-12-2011.

In addition, depending on how much information you choose to enter, you'll get information on your Top Ten Airports, Top Ten Airlines, Top Ten Routes, and Top Ten Aircraft.  I found out through this process that my personally most popular airport to fly through away from home is not Detroit, like I thought, but Milwaukee's Mitchell Field.

You can go a step further and create all sorts of fun, detailed work on your own if you have access to a full-fledged GIS program.  The people over at radicalcartography.net -- who rate high enough for me to write an entire column someday devoted solely to some of the incredible mapmaking they do -- have created personal maps that show the highways they been on across the United States and Canada. 

The interesting thing about radicalcartography's personal highway maps is that they have consciously chosen to not put any markers on the maps -- nothing except for the highways themselves: no highway labels, no state boundaries, no oceans, no rivers or lakes -- just the highways.  It makes for an interesting perspective, especially if a person, say, flies into a city and never leaves the metropolitan area.  


Mark's North America, mid-2010.
Can you tell the destinations?  Was one the Pacific Ocean?


My version of this map was drawn with ArcGIS. It uses only state, provincial, and national highways, except for in instances where a county road was needed to make a particularly long road trip look like we didn't hop in a helicopter for 20 miles. It, like most of my personal maps, is a work in progress.