Creating an interactive 3D map of tree density in Portland, Oregon

Portland is one of my favorite US cities. I love its unique vibe, food cart pod scene, alternative transportation options, and many parks. Before giving a promotional presentation for a soon-to-be-taught Geography Field Seminar course to Oregon, I stumbled upon the pdxTrees R package and at the same time had been experimenting with 3D visualizations through deck.gl. I decided to put these two together for my presentation and was satisfied at how quickly and easily I could produce an interactive of map 200,000+ trees.

The world's largest cycling intersection is spectacularly unremarkable

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In summer of 2024 I made my inaugural pilgrimage to the Netherlands to visit the holy sites of urban design. After years of citing studies about the country’s forward-thinking urban planning techniques, showing videos in class of Groningen’s world class cycling infrastructure, and studying “woonerf” (living streets), I was thrilled to finally make a trip there. ¹

Comparing population densities in states with and without urban growth boundaries

Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) are used to reduce sprawl, preserve farmland, and force development toward city centers. While there are significant debates about their tangible impacts, in theory they should create greater residential population density. While explicitly constraining urban growth is a standard planning practice in most European countries, only three states in the US mandate them: Oregon, Washington, and Tennessee. In this post, I’ll conduct several binary comparisons of residential population densities in states that mandate UGBs with those that do not.

Creating an interactive 3D terrain model of an idyllic Wisconsin river town with Rayshader in R

3D terrain models are fascinating visual tools, and R’s rayshader package makes it shockingly simple to produce them in just a few lines of code. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to (a) retrieve publicly accessible terrain data for the state of Wisconsin, (b) crop that dataset to municipality boundaries using US Census TIGER files, and (c) create the interactive 3D terrain model.

Candidates for Dutch-style roundabouts in the USA: Who wants to construct the first?