Parking: Navigation Apps’ Next Frontier

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A team of MIT researchers think that navigation systems have a parking problem. They’re capable of telling us about traffic congestion and offering us alternate routes, but once we’ve arrived at our destination, we’re on our own when it comes to finding a place to park—and hunting for a parking space can increase emissions, congestion and the effective travel time. As the Fast Company article notes, a third of New York street traffic involves drivers looking for a parking spot. So the researchers modeled a system to address it.

To solve the parking problem, the researchers developed a probability-aware approach that considers all possible public parking lots near a destination, the distance to drive there from a point of origin, the distance to walk from each lot to the destination, and the likelihood of parking success.

The approach, based on dynamic programming, works backward from good outcomes to calculate the best route for the user.

Their method also considers the case where a user arrives at the ideal parking lot but can’t find a space. It takes into the account the distance to other parking lots and the probability of success of parking at each.

The caveat is that this system relies on data, whether directly from the parking lot companies or through crowdsourcing (Waze, but for parking), and that sort of data hasn’t, to my knowledge, been systematized yet.

‘The Map Itself Should Be Messier’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In an interview in the Spring 2026 issue of The World Today, William Rankin, author of Radical Cartography, looks at cartography in the present geopolitical situation and argues that maps need to be up to the challenge of today’s complications: “[M]ainstream cartographic conventions are often inadequate to show a complexity we do understand; and there are situations where we cannot say with confidence where we would put the lines even if we tried. The map itself should be messier. It should raise questions of ambiguity and multiple claims, rather than presenting a simplified version and then walking it back in a footnote.”

Maps in Movies

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

John Nelson and Peter Attwood look at how maps are used in a bunch of different movies (and one TV show: Game of Thrones). They talk about using maps to indicate travel in the Indiana Jones movies (and spoofed by The Muppets), treasure maps and other maps used in the story, maps in titles, et cetera, with just the right amount of nitpicking (i.e., not too much, but not too little either).

The Leventhal Center Is Hiring a Curator

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Leventhal Map Center is looking to hire a curator or associate curator of maps and geography. “This position will play a leading role in advancing the Center’s broad public agenda around the study of maps, space and place, and historical geography, and will hold key responsibilities for the stewardship, growth, and interpretation of the Center’s collections.” Deadline 30 March 2026.

Faye Passow’s State Map Goods

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A pictorial map titled Minnesota: Principal Hot Dishes by Region by Faye Plassow.

About half of Minnesota artist Faye Passow’s Etsy store is filled with map-related merchandise—postcards, prints, napkins and towels, mugs and other stoneware—featuring colourful pictorial maps of the regional specialties of several U.S. states. For example, Minnesota hot dishes by region. What stand out most are the Minnesota and Texas casserole dishes in the shape of their respective states.

Google Maps AI Updates: Ask Maps, Immersive Navigation

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Google just announced a couple of fairly major Gemini AI-powered updates to Google Maps. Ask Maps is a a chatbot that produces personalized responses to questions—essentially an intermediary that sifts the data so you don’t have to, taking into consideration your known preferences (with all that entails: not necessarily good). Immersive Navigation is a 3D mode full of suggestions:

When it’s helpful, Maps will highlight critical road details like lanes, crosswalks, traffic lights, and stop signs to help you make that turn or merge confidently. This spatial understanding of your route is made possible with help from Gemini models, which analyze fresh, real world imagery from Street View and aerial photos to give you an accurate view of things along your route, like landmarks and medians.

Includes voice guidance in more natural language and explaining the pros and cons of alternate routes. All of which requires that the underlying map data be accurate and up to date. We’ve already seen what happens when people blindly follow GPS/satnav driving directions that are in error or out of date; if anything people have proven to be more even credulous with AI chatbots. So we’ll see how this goes.

More on GPS Jamming in the Strait of Hormuz

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

BBC News on GPS jamming in the conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran:

The interference currently affecting ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz is far from the first time that [maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wise] Bockmann has observed GPS jamming impacting vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).

The same thing happened in this region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and electronic interference has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But, she says, “This is next-level.”

Previously: GPS Jamming and the Iran War.

Imaginary Maps as Cartographic Guides

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Bodleian Map Room Blog looks at a specific kind of map of imaginary places, “designed to be a guide to cartographers by showing how to portray certain features, or for the map reader to show what the symbols mean.”

Here’s an example, ‘Colours and symbols used on fair sheets and fair tracing’, issued by the Hydrographic Office of the Navy in 1973. Fair here meaning a document after correction, ready to be used. But is it fair? With this ‘made-up’ map the Hydrographic Office have used real names but in random locations, so Campania, in reality a region of Italy, features, as does the English county of Rutland (though as a town here) and a made-up mountain, Montrosia. Best of all is mention of “Approaches to Valhalla”. The map shows different forms of landscape, both natural and man-made with the symbols used to show those features, and the names are added to give the whole an authentic feel.

It makes sense to do it this way: no single real map is likely to contain every single feature you’re trying to demonstrate.

La figure de la Terre

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
John Churchman, The magnetic atlas; or, Variation charts of the whole terraqueous globe, comprising a system of the variation and dip of the needle, by which, the observations being truly made, the longitude may be ascertained. Plate I. 1794. The Royal Society, RCN 33275.
Detail from John Churchman, The Magnetic Atlas (1794). The Royal Society, RCN 33275.

La figure de la Terre: Un débat franco-anglais (XVIIe-XXIe siècle), an exhibition running at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris from 1 April to 20 June 2026.

This exhibition offers a historical and scientific journey through more than three centuries of research devoted to measuring, modeling and understanding the shape of our planet, from the 17th century through to the space age. Since ancient times, we’ve known that the Earth is, broadly speaking, a sphere. The key question was whether it was slightly flattened at the poles or elongated. To answer this question, scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and geodesists have developed theoretical models, designed innovative instruments and conducted vast observation campaigns around the world. The exhibition features exceptional sources drawn mainly from the collections of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society, testifying to the intensity of scientific exchanges between Paris and London and the decisive role of international cooperation in the production of knowledge.

France seems to have quite a lot of map-related programming lately.

GPS Jamming and the Iran War

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

GPS jamming has become pretty much endemic in every conflict, open, hybrid or frozen, so it’s no surprise that it’s going on in the Persian Gulf: “Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.” The CNN article goes on to explain why GPS (and other GNSS systems) are so vulnerable, and how spoofing and jamming have become so commonplace.

A Paris Symposium on Maps and Popular Culture

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A symposium on maps and popular culture, Popcartographie : cartes et cultures populaires (XIXe-XXIe siècle), will be taking place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Mitterrand site in Paris on 10-11 April 2026. Its three themes: maps in popular culture, maps as amateur practice, and the map as a paraadigm of popular fiction. Free/registration; program at the link. English translation at H-Maps. [Matthew Edney]

AI Crawlers and the Cost of Geospatial Infrastructure

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bill Dollins reacts to Gary Gale’s experience with AI crawlers taking down his mapping project (previously), and what that portends for the open geospatial web. “On its own, this is a small incident. No critical infrastructure failed. No global service collapsed. It is, however, a revealing stress case. It shows how open geospatial infrastructure behaves when exposed to a new class of demand. That demand is continuous, automated, and indifferent to the social and economic assumptions that shaped the system in the first place. This is not an isolated story. It is an early signal of a broader shift already underway.”

Google Maps Granted Access to South Korea’s Map Data, with Conditions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Reuters: “South Korea will soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps doesn’t work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers.” Prior to this decision Google Maps had to use lower-resolution map data in South Korea because it was forbidden from storing South Korea’s high-resolution data on its own servers outside the country. Google will have to abide by certain restrictions, including blurring military and other sensitive facilities and disallowing lat/long coordinates on South Korean territory—South Korea really doesn’t want Google Maps to be used by a military adversary. [Tara Calishain]

Previously: South Korea Deciding Whether to Grant Google and Apple Access to Domestic Map Data.

Aurora’s Map-Themed Fountain Pens

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Product image from the Aurora web site showing the Fra Mauro pen and accompanying bottle of ink. Both are sitting on top of a reproduction of the Fra Mauro map.
Aurora Pen

I’m as much a fountain pen nerd as I am a map nerd, but I somehow only found out just now that Italian pen company Aurora has been releasing a collection of antique map-themed fountain pens. Each is named after a famous mapmaker, with five planned and two announced so far: the Tolomeo (i.e. Ptolemy) in 2024 and the Fra Mauro last year. Your guess is as good as mine as to who the next three will be named after. (The Aurora Instagram account seems to be the one to watch, as it’s more active than other channels.)

Only 680 of each are being made, so these are limited editions. The top and bottom finials represent an armillary and a compass rose, respectively; the trim is silver, the bodies are cellulose acetate, and the nib is 18k gold. The pens use a piston-filling mechanism.

These are not the first map-themed pens I’ve encountered, but they’re certainly the most expensive, with prices somewhere around 1,400 euros (VAT included) at the various online pen stores I’ve checked at. If they’re still in stock, that is.