Putting the CAR in Cartography

CARtography on the open road

As a geographer, I know the damage that automobiles and automobile-dependent landscapes run counter in many ways to social and environmental sustainability. A search of the word "sprawl" on on this blog points to many of the specifics, and the car-sprawl-car feedback loop is a subject on which I can give a one-hour lecture at a moment's notice.

Still, I love cars and open roads. I have visited well over a thousand counties in 47 U.S. states, and I have to admit that public transportation was limited to airplanes in most cases. I have been through a few dozen counties in the Northeast by train, but only places I had already visited countless times by car. In other words, I am hopelessly part of the automobile problem.

And I would have enjoyed being one of the many cartographic fact-checkers that verified the layout of open roads for map-making companies on the eve of World War II. These CARtographers were lauded by the automobile industry at the time, in a short, industry-sponsored video brought to our attention by Greg Miller of National Geographic.