Category: Roads
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Canal Becomes Subway
I wrote about Abandoned Canals in Canada several months ago. That then prompted a comment from loyal 12MC reader Bill Harris. He noted an unusual re-purposing of an abandoned canal across the border in the United States. Specifically he referenced a portion of the Erie Canal that originally flowed through downtown Rochester, NY (part of…
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(Mostly) Fictional Ferries
I receive an inordinate amount of visitor traffic on my Ferry Maps of the World site. Very few of those hits come from 12MC readers. It’s basically a lot of one-and-done landings from people who never return to the website ever again. Google decided it didn’t like me about a year ago or I was…
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Latitudinal Border Station Extremes
So I’m not sure the title adequately conveyed what I’m trying to describe. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better concise title to replace it either. Conceptually, I wanted to know the northernmost and southernmost places in the world and in the United States where one could cross an international border by automobile via a…
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Pennsylvanians are From Mars, Texans are From Venus
I keep a close eye on the geographic characteristics of Twelve Mile Circle visitors, which seems natural for a geo-oddity website. I also generate article topics from viewer anomalies. For example, I never knew about Mars in Pennsylvania (map) until a Martian visitor, one from a spot north of Pittsburgh as it turned out, jumped…
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What the Stravenue?
Followers of Twelve Mile Circle are aware of my fascination with portmanteaus, the mashing together of two distinct words to form a single new word (see the portmanteau tag for several examples). So I stumbled across a new one, or at least a new one to me, as I attempted to find variations on Public…
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Rapid Transit in 1844
I’ve slowly been overhauling the non-12MC part of my website to upgrade to Google Maps API v3. That’s the portion for which I obtained the howderfamily.com domain long before Twelve Mile Circle became the tail wagging the dog. As part of that I revisited a genealogy page I wrote about ten years ago. It looked…
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No Names and Nameless
The article on Public Streets seemed generate more than the usual amount of interest and lots of great comments, as well as a hint of familiarity. Input from loyal reader David Overton sent me down an interesting tangent. He mentioned No Name Street, which he believed might be “another contender for ‘laziest street name’”. He…
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Race Across America
The recently concluded Dust Bowl Marathon Series continues to play on my mind. Five towns served as a home base during the event. Of course, each one of them rolled out the red carpet for us. Ulysses, Kansas stepped it up an additional notch above the high bar exhibited by the rest. They seemed to…
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Odds and Ends 7
A number of items have come up recently although none large enough for a single article. It’s time to resurrect a recurring theme. The 12MC “Odds and Ends” compilation ratchets up to #7. Google Maps Treasure Map By now everyone should be aware of the April Fools layer on Google Maps yesterday. It created a…