Members of the Social Computing Group at MIT have created beautiful — and functional — maps of independent coffee shops in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Cambridge and Brooklyn.
Better yet, the colored parts of the map show a region that is walkable, within 1 kilometer (0.7 mile), for each coffee shop.
The maps are interactive; when you click on a location, it opens the shop's Google+ page.
For these maps, the researchers used the Google Places API and the Google Distance Matrix API, but as they explain on their FAQ page, they usually get information for their maps "from wherever we can. Sometimes we use Google Street View. Sometimes we use census data. Sometimes we use city-level data from police reports or zoning ordinances."
The maps are perfect for coffee-loving visitors to any of these cities, or even for someone wanting to open up an independent coffee shop of their own.
Check out a few of the maps below:
(Via Uptown Almanac)