Wednesday, December 9, 2009

And one of Baltimore



This one is even better, showing the growth of Baltimore (done by NASA). If you imagine all that orange space filled up with cars rushing about, using oil, it's sort of intuitive that the bigger it is, the more oil it takes to power it.

Simplistic, I know, but I think it helps the intuition to see it...

4 comments:

Datamunger said...

Yeast!

kjmclark said...

Check out the explosive growth when we hit the automobile era. There were some rail suburbs starting in the late 19th century, but it really takes off in the 1920s.

... and it only runs to 1992...

Stuart Staniford said...

Kjm - your comment makes me wonder whether it's possible to find historical data on the total urban area within the US (in sq miles or whatever), and see how the trend you identify shows up in that data. The census bureau must have this data in some shape or form, right? (Unfortunately, in my experience the census bureau has the most disorganized and hard to navigate website of any federal agency).

Mark Nicholson said...

cancer...