The extent of the forest fires in and around Los Angeles is horrific and may become even worse in the next few days. The New York Times has some very detailed maps showing the extent of destruction. Here is a close up of Altadena from the Hurst Fire. via New York Times - images reformatted to better fit this page This one shows the Palisades Fire. I’ve broken it into eastern and western sections with a slight overlap to make it more readable, however the best way to see it is on their site, though there may be a paywall. via New York Times Here is a Los Angeles Times map showing the current extent of the major fires. There are other small ones including one in Ventura County. The red areas are mandatory evacuation zones, yellow is the evacuation warning zones. Here is a detail of the Palisades fire better showing the fire perimeter and zone boundaries. The 1 and 27 are route numbers, not specific points of interest. via Los Angeles Times

New York City just introduced congestion pricing in an attempt to eliminate gridlock. There have been many other plans over the years to alter the city to improve traffic flow, also to create housing and solve environmental problems. One of the most ambitious plans was this one, "A Really Greater New York"  detailed in a 1916 issue of Popular Science Monthly. This plan came from Dr. T. Kennard Thomson, a consulting engineer on skyscraper foundations and expert on pneumatic caissons (watertight structures for building underwater). He expressed a high level of confidence that the new real estate created would pay for the project’s enormous costs. It involved creating many new lands including extending the tip of Manhattan and a new island off Sandy Hook, New Jersey that would connect by tunnel to Staten Island and then to Manhattan. The plan proposed rerouting the East and Harlem Rivers, while filling in the old East River, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. “New York and Brooklyn would be as much one big city as are the East Side and the West Side.” A new East River would be dug across Queens connecting Jamaica Bay with Flushing Bay. The Harlem River would also be moved and straightened to reduce ship congestion. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was proposed to be relocated to Newark Bay with a new river cutting across Bayonne, New Jersey to link the yard to the Hudson and East Rivers. This would simplify ship access, reduce congestion and help create a “maritime Pittsburgh”. One of the more thoughtful aspects of the plans is to build subway lines, sewers and electrical conduits before the new lands are filled in so it will “never be necessary to tear up the streets to get at these necessary arteries of city life.” “The tax assessments alone will make a fortune!“ Though this plan was never implemented, the expansion of the tip of Manhattan has been suggested many times since, including in this New York Times article from 2022.

This map shows the fastest growing and shrinking cities in the United States and Canada using 2023 data. The map appears on Visual Capitalist and the data is only for the city populations, it does not reflect the overall metropolitan areas. The top seven population gainers are all in Canada, while all of the population losers are in the United States.  The article does mention that if the metro areas were included, Toronto and other Canadian cities would still top the list but there is little other discussion. I suspect there is a bit of a cultural difference in the desirability of city vs suburb between the two countries and that looking at the metropolitan areas as a whole would balance out the numbers to an extent. Another factor for this specific time period (July, 2022 - July, 2023) could be that there was a temporary rise in crime in United States cities which has since abated.

Gridviz is a Javascript library for visualizing gridded (raster) data. They created a Christmas themed map showing land use with holiday emojis.  Also if you visit the Gridmas page you can watch the snow fall over Europe. You can pan and zoom around, however if you try to go elsewhere in the world you’ll see that the data has its limits. There are a few options at the bottom of the page, allowing you to change the view to a population map showing how many Christmas elves live in each grid cell using your emoji of choice. So, have yourself a merry gridmas!