Weekend reading, land use and otherwise: The Best American Infographics 2013

Over the winter break I was traveling for almost three weeks straight for a variety of personal and professional reasons.  Along the way, I picked up one of the best travel books I have come across in a long time:  The Best American Infographics 2013.  The book is a collection of several hundred infographics published in 2013, almost any one of which is an instant conversation-starter.  

A number of the infographics also have land-use related themes.  For example, below is one infographic reproduced in the book that illustrates the distribution of tweets in and around Manhattan.  This reminds me of the old Foster Kleiser traffic maps used to determine advertising rates for billboards.  Might the distribution of tweets one day replace complicated traffic studies and the need to place traffic engineers at intersections counting cars?  We might not be too far off.

That is just one graphic.  As I say, the whol book makes for great conversation, land use and otherwise.