Mapping the Paths Most Traveled

D.C. is a great city for runners. On my long runs this fall, I'd measure the distance in landmarks: half a mile to Union Station, another half to the Capitol, about 1.5 miles across the National Mall to the base of the Washington Monument, and another half to Jefferson Memorial—then back. For someone like me, who's relatively new to running, it's nice to be able to break up distances into bite-sized goals. And what the map above shows is that I'm far from the only one using my city's monuments as milestones the same way.

Mapbox developer Garrett Miller is a runner, too. This year, he found himself traveling a lot, and so navigating a number of unfamiliar cities on foot. To help him out, his colleague Eric Fischer pulled some data from RunKeeper (a route mapping app that recently partnered with Mapbox) and displayed 1.5 million walks, runs and bike rides in cities all over of the world.