Mapping the Heatwave

While America braces itself for record low temperatures Australians are basking in a heatwave. ABC has created a Live Heatwave Tracker to map temperatures that have hit as high as 50 degrees centigrade.

The tracker is an animated map of temperatures recorded throughout Australia. You can use the slider beneath the map to view temperatures at specific times and dates and zoom in on the map to

Public Rest Rooms on your Route

The Australian Government's Department of Social Services as part of the National Continence Program has released the National Public Toilet Map. The map provides information on over 16,000 public toilets with information about accessibility, opening hours and facilities, such as showers & baby change.

The National Toilet Map uses the Google Maps API to allow Australians to search for nearby

Managing Urban Sprawl with Google Maps

Peri-urban Melbourne is a Google Maps based application for modelling peri-urban development pressures in Melbourne.

The site includes a series of interactive Google Maps that present information for the planning community and help to foster an understanding of future policy requirements. The maps are organised under themes: Population Projection, Supply and Demand, Impact Analysis, Offsets/ Mitigations, and Township Analysis.

The Google Maps provide spatial context to the details presented in tabular and graph formats.

Via: All Things Spatial

Canberra Crime on Google Maps

Australian mapping blog All Things Spatial has published a nice review of two recent Google Maps based applications mapping crime in Canberra.

The Canberra Times has created a Crime in the Capital Map. This map shows the number of all crimes committed in the Australian capital during 2011. It is also possible to view heat map layers on the map that break down the data by type of crime.


The Australian Federal Police has also recently released their own Canberra Crime Statistics Map.

The map provides the local community with crime statistics, allows users to view comparisons between suburbs and displays crime trends over the past five years. Arek, of All Things Spatial, praises the map for its comprehensiveness. It really is a nicely designed map with an intuitive interface that allows the user to view, select and compare the underlying crime data.

Australia's New Broadband Network Map

In Australia a new broadband network is being rolled out. Over the next ten years over 200,000 km of fibre-optic cable will be deployed across the country and up to 6,000 homes a day will be connected to the new network.

Australians can use the NBN Rollout Google Map to see when their homes will be connected to the network. Users of the map can search by address, postcode or suburb and find out if NBN work is underway or planned to commence soon in their area.

Some areas on the map may not appear on the rollout plan, as the map only shows areas where plans for the national network have been announced so far.

Brisbane's CityBikes on Google Maps

City Cycle NOW! is a real-time Google Map of the number of bikes currently available at each of Brisbane's CityCycle bike stations.

The official CityCycle website also uses Google Maps to show the location of bike stations in the city. However to find out the number of bikes available at individual stations on the CityCycle map involves clicking on the station's map marker.

City Cycle NOW! on the other hand uses a coloured map marker system to show stations with no bikes (red), stations with only a few bikes available (orange) and stations with more than five bikes (green).

Australian Rain Radars on Google Maps

BOMMap is an Australian weather map that allows users to view animations of the latest radar images from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.

The initial view of BOMMap shows where it is currently raining in Australia and therefore where radar animations are also currently available to view on the map. Users just need to select one of the displayed map markers to view the latest radar animation from that location.

The creator of BOMMap has also set up a subReddit where users can submit suggestions and possible improvements to the map.

Tour the Tour Down Under

Cycling the Alps has created video tours of each of the stages in the upcoming Tour Down Under cycling race. The Tour Down Under is a UCI WorldTour cycling race, held in Adelaide, Australia, which starts next week.

Cycling the Alps has created Google Earth fly-through tours for each stage of the tour. You can view videos of each of the tours or view them with the Google Earth browser plug-in on the Cycling the Alps website.

Cycling the Alps has also created Street View tours for each stage of the race. The Street View tours animate through each stage using Google Maps Street View.

Not content with creating Google Earth and Street View tours you can also play a Google Earth based game for each stage. The game shows you the route of each stage on Google Earth and requires the user to guide a cyclist from the start to the finish of the stage.

If any of the tours or games grab your fancy you can even grab the embed code and add them to your own website or blog.

Traffic Alerts on Google Maps

During this year‟s floods in Victoria, Australia almost 400 roads were closed across the state. A number of road bridges were also washed away. This experience has encouraged the state to invest $924,000 in a new real-time traffic alert system.

At the heart of the new system, VicRoads - Road Closures and Traffic Alerts, is a real-time Google Map of road closures, crashes and breakdowns.

During major emergencies such as fires or floods the map will include information about all road closures. It also provides traffic alert information during non-emergency times for incidents such as crashes and breakdowns.

Via: All Things Spatial

The Coal Seam Gas Rush on Google Maps

ABC News has used Fusion Tables and Google Maps to help map Australia's Coal Seam Gas Rush.

ABC News estimate that there will be at least 40,000 coal seam gas wells in Australia by 2030. The map allows users to search for gas wells by location and explore the full extent of coal seam gas mining in the Great Artesian Basin.

It is possible to click on individual wells to see their status, depth, the name of the company that owns the well and the exact geographical location. The 'leases' tab allows users to see where coal seam gas companies have the right to look for more gas.

Australia's Headspace on Google Maps

Headspace, Australia's National Youth Mental Health Foundation, are using Google Maps to show the locations of their centres throughout Australia.

Users of the map can search for centres by postcode. Custom map markers and a numbered marker clustering solution help to give the map a coherent style, consistent with the overall design of the Headspace website.

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Shopping in Sydney with Google Maps

Urban Walkabout is a comprehensive on-line shopping guide to the popular shopping areas in Perth and Sydney, Australia.



The site includes Google Maps for both Perth and Sydney, displaying all the best shops in all the popular suburbs of both cities. The shops on each map are categorised into Fashion & Bodycare, Objects & Art, Food & Drink, Stay & Explore and Shopping Centres.



If you click on a shop's marker on the map you can then click through to read Urban Walkabout's full review of the establishment.



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Australian Postcodes on Google Maps

Postcode Finder is a great application that shows Australia's postcodes on a Google Map. Using Postcade Finder a postcode search can be performed as either a text search or as a geographic query with a simple click on the map.



All Things Spatial has a nice post about the latest version of Postcode Finder. The post explains the choice of using Fusion Tables to create the application rather than a Web Map Service (WMS), and looks at the positive and negative outcomes of this choice.



Postcode Finder



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Easy Riding on Google Maps

Motorcycle Roads



Motorcycle Roads is a community driven guide to great motorcycle rides in America. Each of the great motorbike rides is accompanied by a Google Map of the ride's route.



Each mapped route includes details about the ride's length, road quality and roadside amenities. The scenery, road quality and amenities are each rated by the route's submitter and include written details.



Sunday Morning Rides



Sunday Morning Rides has used Google Maps to map over 1,500 great motorbike rides throughout the USA.



You can search for rides by state and view each ride on its own map. Each route comes with an interactive elevation chart, which, if you mouseover, shows the Street View for that location.



Motorcycle Network

Motorcycle Network is a directory of everything to do with motorcycles in Australia. The site uses Google Maps to show all the parking spots in the major cities and also show all the motorcycle and scooter dealers, mechanics and gear shops, as well as all the training facilities, tours, insurance and hire places around Australia.



Mr Zip66's Easy Rider Map

Denis Hopper's Easy Rider is to many the seminal counter-culture movie of the 1960's. Some of us may never get the chance to ride a bike across the States but thanks to Mr Zip we can follow the route on Google Maps.



Mr Zip has pieced together the locations used in the film and managed to put together a rough approximation of the route. The map itself is simple enough, showing the route in blue, with a few map markers showing the locations of the main scenes in the movie.



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Australian Social Diversity on Google Maps

Arek of the All Things Spatial blog has created a series of Google Maps to highlight social diversity in New South Wales, Australia.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics attempts to quantify socio-economic diversity for geographic locations with a suite of four summary measures called Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA). Arek has imported the Bureau's data for the four measures into Fusion Tables and created a map for each.

Each map provides a heat-map visualisation of one of the measure. In each map you can click on any of New South Wales' postal areas to view the area's rank and decile.

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Australian Ash Cloud on Google Maps

Planefinder.net

The ash cloud created by the eruption of the Puyehue volcano in Chile continues to cause huge disruption to plane flights in Australia. Real-time flight tracking website planefinder.net is using Google Maps to show the location of the ash cloud as it drifts around the southern hemisphere.

The ash cloud is predicted to linger over south-east Australia for some time, causing widespread disruption to flights in and out of Sydney and Melbourne. At the time of writing the planefinder.net map shows a few flights in and out of south-east Australian airports but nowhere near the flight activity that can be seen in and around Perth.

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The Best Australian Flights on Google Maps

GetFlight

GetFlight is a Google Maps based application that displays the cheapest flights in and out of Australia. The application tracks sale fares for the four major domestic carriers and some of the largest international airlines that operate in and out of the country and displays them on a map.

To start you can just click on one of the major cities and the cheapest domestic and international flights are immediately shown on the map. It is also possible to type in your starting point and your destination of choice to see the best deals for that journey.

If you select the 'search direct' button you can also define the dates you wish to travel and select which airlines you wish to fly with.

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Mapping Wild Camels with Google Maps

CamelScan

Australia is being plagued by feral camels. More than 1 million camels are roaming the Australian desert causing damage to water supplies and disturbing Aboriginal communities.

CamelScan is a new crowdsouced project that allows anyone to report sightings of feral camels in Australia on a Google Map. Through this initiative CamelScan will be able to develop a regional map and national picture of where feral camels occur, and work out where they congregate in different seasons.

By mapping the damage caused by camels, CamelScan can help to identify when, where and how to control feral camels in order to reduce the damage they cause.

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Invest in Property with Help of Google Maps

Property Investment Map

If you are looking to develop your property investment portfolio in Australia then you should use this Google Map.

The map presents information on gross rental yields, capital gains, vendor discounts and top performing areas by suburb, for all of Australia (excluding ACT). It is also possible to view the overall trends for the last year or for the last five years.

Using the map investors can pinpoint suburbs with good rental yields and capital growth prospects. The Australian blog All things spatial says that the "Property Investment Map should be in the toolbox of not only investors but also anyone serious about purchasing a property."

Via: All things spatial

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Coalition Turning Google Maps Blue

NSW Electorate Map

On Saturday New South Wales, Australia held its state election. The Sydney Morning Herald has produced this Google Map to visualise the results in each electorate.

The map is coloured-coded so that you can tell at a glance which party won in each electorate. If you click on any of the individual electoral regions the results of the election are displayed in the map sidebar.

Via: All Things Spatial

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