All Streets
All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. This began as an example I created for a student in the fall of 2006, and I just recently got a chance to document it properly.
Alaska and Hawaii were initially left out for simplicity's sake, but I felt guilty because of the sad emails received from zipdecode visitors. Unfortunately, the two states don't "work" because there aren't enough roads to outline their shape, so I left them out permanently. More technical details can be found here and additional updates
here.
San Francisco
A detail of the West shows the relative lack of roads in mountainous areas, punctuated by the densely populated Bay Area.
Kansas City
The white blocks seem to be rural routes and unnamed roads, their alignment to lat/lon boundaries suggests differences in how adjacent counties identify streets.
The Great Lakes
Chicago and the shore on the left, Detroit to the right: a wonderful range of sparse and complex in this crop.
Appalachian Mountains
The ridges of the Appalachian mountain range emerge from the roads that avoid them (or follow their contours).