City Size Comparison

April 24, 2003 10:22 AM

City Size Comparison lets you, well, compare the relative sizes of various US cities side-by-side. The site also lets you compare US cities to Baghdad, which "may be useful if you are trying to envision driving through, searching or invading Baghdad, but you've never actually been there." [via xblog]
posted by kirkaracha (14 comments total)

I recently did a similar thing to realize that while I live in a much larger town (Baltimore MD) than I grew up in (Astoria OR) the actual area I move about in (live, work and shop) is no larger than my home town (about two miles).
posted by dipolemoment at 10:48 AM on April 24, 2003

Can I take a moment to complain about the "map" of New York City they show on the intro page - Manhattan is not the sum total of New York, there are 5 boroughs.

shesh, Staten Island is not even partially shown!
posted by Julnyes at 11:40 AM on April 24, 2003

And now we play Soviet Union's favourite gameshow, What Fits Into Russia? Look, all of United States fits into Russia--with plenty of room left!
posted by arto at 12:07 PM on April 24, 2003

That would be neat, except it's not. The perspective is all off. The Chicago map is cut off at Lincoln Park on the northside and Hyde Park on the southside. So it really should be "1/3 City Size Comparison."
posted by alou73 at 12:28 PM on April 24, 2003

If you read the guy's explanation, the point of the exercise is to use exactly the same scale for each city. The bigger the city is, the more cropping.
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:46 PM on April 24, 2003

What Mars said. You can use his site to compare two Yahoo maps, and simply set them at the same scale or re-center them if you want to view things differently.
posted by Songdog at 1:04 PM on April 24, 2003

I realize that, I was just venting.

Please ignore any future manhattan-centric rants I have - its a sore spot.
posted by Julnyes at 1:30 PM on April 24, 2003

It's a neat idea. Maybe he'll create more so that there are more than six cities to choose from. (Five of them being from the left or right coast, naturally. Sigh.)

I'm no coder, but I'm wondering if someone could write some to retrieve any two maps from Yahoo at exactly the same size.

Julnyes: People from Michigan have the same reaction when someone assumes Detroit is representative of the whole state.
posted by pmurray63 at 1:55 PM on April 24, 2003

Another approach might be to pan them all out to the size of, say, LA. Then photoshop the boundries of each city with a red line. Then you can still have the standard view but with no cropping.
posted by jragon at 2:06 PM on April 24, 2003

pmurray63, i sent this link to someone earlier today, a mefi member actually, he came up with this.

looks like there would be countless ways of customizing something like that.
posted by th3ph17 at 2:23 PM on April 24, 2003

I'm wondering if someone could write some to retrieve any two maps from Yahoo at exactly the same size

The City Size Comparison site does this, too, but the one th3ph17 posted is nicer.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:34 PM on April 24, 2003

pmurray63, i sent this link to someone earlier today, a mefi member actually, he came up with this.

Holy crap, that was fast. Pretty good too. If there was a way to zoom in/out (simultaneously, of course) it would be even better.

I'm also wondering if somebody could find a way to transfer one million dollars into an offshore bank account with my name on it.
posted by pmurray63 at 5:11 PM on April 24, 2003

Julnyes, I commute in from New Jersey (the sixth borough), so I know how you feel.
posted by Songdog at 6:53 PM on April 24, 2003

City-size comparison, pre-improved for the unobservant.

-Rob Cockerham
posted by cockeyed at 6:09 PM on April 25, 2003