The map appears to date from the early 1970s: Highway 280 is there but appears to have Cañada Road routing from before the ridge freeway was finished. Or I could be misreading that part of the map and it is from later, maybe the 1980s?
It's interesting how many inaccuracies there are. Living in Menlo Park, I checked a few local landmarks. Palo Alto Airport is in the right place, but where is San Carlos Airport? They seem to have moved it across the street from Facebook!
And note the airport near where 280 and Highway 92 cross.
The map is also very hard to read. Look at Highway 101. Unlike 280, it's mostly in white, but if you follow it through Redwood City just north of Woodside Road (Highway 84), it looks like 101 is routed along Veterans Boulevard - which was bypassed years before this map was made. If you look again, there is a brown stretch that is close to the actual freeway alignment.
Then follow 280 down into Los Altos, where it changes from brown to white as it approaches Cupertino and into San Jose. This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.
Many of the local streets are recognizable but have a very approximate hand-drawn look to them. I'll be curious to hear what anyone else notices in their neighborhood.
This is easily the most interesting, and worst quality, map of the Bay Area I've seen. I wonder why it has so many little things wrong, when they could have simply sent a spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?
Given how far off from the city centers many of those place names were -- look where they put Саннивейл, Маунтин-Вью, and good lord, Сан-Хосе, for example - it's good to know that when the Red Dawn[1]-style invasion finally came, their paratroopers would have been horribly confused at where they landed. Thinking they were about to land on the roof of the Blue Cube, but getting ambushed in a parking of some Fry's or Denny's instead.
i wonder what navigation system North Korea is using/planning to use for its ballistic missiles. Commercial GPS signal with fallback on good old star-based plus inertial?
Why would they have used satellite photos when they could just have taken out a subscription to National Geographic and get all the maps they wanted, or bought a Rand McNally road atlas, or a stack of Michelin maps or... well, you get it: there was no shortage of maps of 'the free west' at their disposal. Where satellite photos came into play it would have been to fill in the blanks left by those maps: things which showed up on satellite photos but were missing on recent maps were clearly of interest.
> This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.
It looks to me that it's to do with contrast against the surroundings. The build up areas are brown and the roads through them are white, when the roads leave the build up area they change to brown. This contrasts against the white background giving a visual continuation of the road.
The brown sections of the road are also thicker, perhaps that indicates multiple lanes or even possibly different road surfaces.
Heh... I made a bunch of wallpapers out of edited versions of this map a few years ago... I can't find them on Imgur mobile (shittiest mobile view of my thousands of pics up there)
I remember a talk from a map librarian who said that the Soviets didn't just copy western maps, as they often had more detail and unique elements that the western maps didn't have. One thing, for example was the heights of bridges, and widths of roads.
Makes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you’ll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says “this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds” (so can hold multiple tanks at once).
Multiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.
I once talked to a guy working in the local government responsible for all-things-roads in a town in Germany. He showed me some maps and building plans of bridges and told me that these maps/plans were actually highly classified in the cold war.
Makes sense to me that the soviets collected everything.
It's probably the most comprehensive in terms of personnel and man-hours; those other mapping efforts are highly automated, but the descriptions of these maps imply a lot of people on the ground making them so detailed, since for a lot of the map details I don't see how you could reasonably get them from looking at a satellite map or a few public records. (Or perhaps they simply mean most comprehensive as in up to that point in time, which is a legitimate amount of hyperbole such an endeavour.)
As astonishingly accurate as Google's maps are, they lack a lot of resolution and data for under-developed regions like Oceania and Central Asia. The quality of the Soviet mapping projects were such that they're still competitive with a lot of the commercial offerings today for the more remote regions of the planet.
Here's a Soviet map of the San Francisco Bay Area:
https://i.imgur.com/BxDJC6f.jpg (direct link)
https://imgur.com/a/FiEGm (Imgur page in case the above doesn't work)
The map appears to date from the early 1970s: Highway 280 is there but appears to have Cañada Road routing from before the ridge freeway was finished. Or I could be misreading that part of the map and it is from later, maybe the 1980s?
It's interesting how many inaccuracies there are. Living in Menlo Park, I checked a few local landmarks. Palo Alto Airport is in the right place, but where is San Carlos Airport? They seem to have moved it across the street from Facebook!
And note the airport near where 280 and Highway 92 cross.
The map is also very hard to read. Look at Highway 101. Unlike 280, it's mostly in white, but if you follow it through Redwood City just north of Woodside Road (Highway 84), it looks like 101 is routed along Veterans Boulevard - which was bypassed years before this map was made. If you look again, there is a brown stretch that is close to the actual freeway alignment.
Then follow 280 down into Los Altos, where it changes from brown to white as it approaches Cupertino and into San Jose. This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.
Many of the local streets are recognizable but have a very approximate hand-drawn look to them. I'll be curious to hear what anyone else notices in their neighborhood.
This is easily the most interesting, and worst quality, map of the Bay Area I've seen. I wonder why it has so many little things wrong, when they could have simply sent a spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?
Given how far off from the city centers many of those place names were -- look where they put Саннивейл, Маунтин-Вью, and good lord, Сан-Хосе, for example - it's good to know that when the Red Dawn[1]-style invasion finally came, their paratroopers would have been horribly confused at where they landed. Thinking they were about to land on the roof of the Blue Cube, but getting ambushed in a parking of some Fry's or Denny's instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn
i wonder what navigation system North Korea is using/planning to use for its ballistic missiles. Commercial GPS signal with fallback on good old star-based plus inertial?
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A bit more haunting for me on the east coast, the Pentagon:
https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-sovi...
That's pretty cool, do you suppose the water depth is in fathoms, meters, or just incorrect?
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First of, direct links to imgur seems to just reroute to the imgur page these days.
Secondly, i suspect the inaccuracies comes from using satellite photos to draw the maps.
Why would they have used satellite photos when they could just have taken out a subscription to National Geographic and get all the maps they wanted, or bought a Rand McNally road atlas, or a stack of Michelin maps or... well, you get it: there was no shortage of maps of 'the free west' at their disposal. Where satellite photos came into play it would have been to fill in the blanks left by those maps: things which showed up on satellite photos but were missing on recent maps were clearly of interest.
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> This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.
It looks to me that it's to do with contrast against the surroundings. The build up areas are brown and the roads through them are white, when the roads leave the build up area they change to brown. This contrasts against the white background giving a visual continuation of the road.
The brown sections of the road are also thicker, perhaps that indicates multiple lanes or even possibly different road surfaces.
Heh... I made a bunch of wallpapers out of edited versions of this map a few years ago... I can't find them on Imgur mobile (shittiest mobile view of my thousands of pics up there)
But I'll find on desktop and find them...
> spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?
How do you know that it is accurate?
Good point: the gas station road map probably has trap streets on it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
If we couldn't catch the spies for spying, at least we could catch them for copyright violation.
At least it will be accurate where normal people usually drive--otherwise those normal people would complain.
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I remember a talk from a map librarian who said that the Soviets didn't just copy western maps, as they often had more detail and unique elements that the western maps didn't have. One thing, for example was the heights of bridges, and widths of roads.
You might want to jump straight into the examples: https://redatlasbook.com/cityplans
Flash is needed though...
Make no mistake, we have that as well. Worldwide: https://www.sddc.army.mil/sites/TEA/Functions/SpecialAssista...
Is anyone else getting a non-secure warning from chrome?
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Makes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you’ll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says “this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds” (so can hold multiple tanks at once).
Multiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.
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Is that literally true? I would have expected Germans to rate their bridges in tons, not pounds/pfund.
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A lot of bridges everywhere are marked with their capacity. I don't think it's necessarily for the purpose of tanks.
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Those are MLC (Military Load Classification) signs.
I once talked to a guy working in the local government responsible for all-things-roads in a town in Germany. He showed me some maps and building plans of bridges and told me that these maps/plans were actually highly classified in the cold war.
Makes sense to me that the soviets collected everything.
Wired did an article on this topic: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/
> This is the never-before-told story of the world’s most comprehensive mapping endeavour
Is it? Arguably, the mapping efforts of Google and others have reached further and collected more and more accurate data (street view, lidar, etc.).
It's probably the most comprehensive in terms of personnel and man-hours; those other mapping efforts are highly automated, but the descriptions of these maps imply a lot of people on the ground making them so detailed, since for a lot of the map details I don't see how you could reasonably get them from looking at a satellite map or a few public records. (Or perhaps they simply mean most comprehensive as in up to that point in time, which is a legitimate amount of hyperbole such an endeavour.)
As astonishingly accurate as Google's maps are, they lack a lot of resolution and data for under-developed regions like Oceania and Central Asia. The quality of the Soviet mapping projects were such that they're still competitive with a lot of the commercial offerings today for the more remote regions of the planet.
Check Amap, they have coloured 3d maps of all global cities with photo textures.
http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html
Interesting.
For what it's worth: Google Earth (and Google Maps) have 3d buildings and vegetation etc now, too.
(But I wonder whether it's based on new data, or they just use machine learning to guess the 3d shapes from the 2d data they already had.)
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However civilian maps were deliberately obfuscated in the Soviet Union. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-m...
This site has some great links: https://sovietmaps.com/resources
Meanwhile, the SR71 made pictures