How far can you get from a McDonald's in the continental US?

http://www.weathersealed.com/2009/09/22/where-the-buffalo-roamed/

by timf • 17 years ago

140 26 17 years ago

weathersealed.com

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

And I suddenly regret taking I-90 on my last drive through SD. Damn!

fjabre• 17 years ago

and that my friends is a lot of saturated fat...

crsmith• 17 years ago

The most interesting thing about this article to me is where the author got the data -- http://www.aggdata.com .

I ran across aggdata some time ago while looking for a list that they happened to provide for free. They provide niche data that they scraped from the internet. Their data is cheap enough that it's not worth trying to scrape the data yourself. I think the business model can be duplicated easily and there is plenty of room on the long tail.

joshu• 17 years ago

Yeah. Good stuff.

I once scraped the data for Starbucks in Manhattan and it was a bit of a pain: http://gawker.com/011483/gentrification-map (2003? I feel old.)

wallflower• 17 years ago

OT but first thing that I thought of (logistics were crazy):

Comedian/Filmmaker Mark Malkoff attempts to visit all 171 Starbucks stores in Manhattan in one day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwYxuV2dVzw

gthb• 17 years ago

Too bad AggData only has the US locations — the furthest spot on the planet from a McDonalds would be of no less interest.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

North Pole, South Pole or the middle of the Pacific.

Probably the South Pole.

unalone• 17 years ago

I've actually been there. It was a surreal feeling, one that is hard to explain in words. There was something about that place that made me feel alive, free from constraints, for some reason I could think clearer, and hunt for the answers.

There is also a really nice Arby's there.

src: http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/9nbyc/on_a_recent_road...

davidw2• 17 years ago

I would have guessed that it was in Oregon's "empty quarter". There is a whole lot of nothing in southeastern Oregon:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

It's extremely desolate: it's very cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and dry year round, so nothing much grows out there.

But it's a fascinating place to explore if you like big empty spaces (or at least like them once in a while - I wouldn't want to live there).

mahmud• 17 years ago

It's extremely desolate: it's very cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and dry year round, so nothing much grows out there.

Oh man, you have no idea; some really good shit grows in that part of the country.

davidw2• 17 years ago

I think most of the drug operations are in western Oregon, actually, which has an extremely different climate.

scott_s• 17 years ago

I figured Death Valley.

hughprime• 17 years ago

I was in Death Valley a few weeks ago and I was surprised to find it wasn't all that big, or all that isolated. Heck, most of it is within 100 miles of Las Vegas (and more importantly, it's all within about 70 miles of the McDonald's in Pahrump NV on one side and Lone Pine CA on the other).

(I guess coming from Australia I might have different standards of "big" and "isolated" though.)

asmosoinio• 17 years ago

The answer, for those too lazy to read the article:

--- Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car! ---

dotcoma• 17 years ago

Vermont?

timmaah• 17 years ago

Vermont is only 160 miles long and 80 miles wide and probably has a good 20-25 mcdonalds.

(Although it is the only state to not have one in the capital city, also the only state to not have one in its largest city)

lupin_sansei• 17 years ago

McDonalds restaurants (per capita) by country

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_mcd_res_percap-food-mc...

aw3c2• 17 years ago

If you like this kind of stuff, then OpenStreetMap is for you. Because it is free and open you can use the data to create such visualisations easily. Granted of course, that someone (how about you) added the information you want to look at.

cschneid• 17 years ago

Does anybody know how that map was generated? What software can easily assemble geolocated data into a nice glowing map? I assume you could do it manually via processing or similar, but there's gotta be something pre-assembled.

DEinspanjer• 17 years ago

If you are willing to pay money, tools like AmMaps and Tableau can fill the "pre-assembled" requirement.

For free, you can use the Many Eyes project to do this kind of visualization as long as you can transform your data source into the required format.

There was also a neat proof of concept that someone from the OpenLayers community did a while back:

http://crschmidt.net/mapping/choropleth.html

I've used that code in my Mozilla Metrics to generate some nice choropleth maps.

Finally, there is the code that I worked on as part of the Mozilla downloadstats visualization. It reads a JSON feed of locations and puts markers on a Canvas map. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/

https://svn.mozilla.org/metrics/downloadvis

blogimus• 17 years ago

No its not in the CONUS, but many moons ago I was at Fort Greely, Alaska. When I was done with my tour and if conversation turned to the topic of my past travels, people would ask the whereabouts of Ft Greely. I say it was 100 miles south of Fairbanks. I usually get a small nod. When I then followed up with "and 90 miles from the nearest McDonalds" their eyes usually got bigger.

marze• 17 years ago

I would guess a map showing a dot for every 25k people would look very similar.

How far can you get from a McDonald's in the continental US?

Related Stories