How far can you get from a McDonald's in the continental US? | Hacker News Reader

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

weathersealed.com

140 pointstimf26 comments

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.

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.)

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

Traveling salesmen, with 171 locations, in Manhattan, ouch.

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

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

Probably the South Pole.

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...

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).

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.

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

Try underground containers in northern Ontario. I heard someone there joke that Canada now grows the larger amount of its cash crops underground...

I figured Death Valley.

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.)

So what's the furthest point from a McDonald's in Australia, then? :)

That would probably be around the middle of Western Australia, since there's a Macka's in Alice Springs that throws out the absolute middle of the country as a candidate. Also, if you look at a road map, that spot in the middle of WA is the furthest from major ("interstate") highways.

edit: http://mcdonalds.com.au/find-us/restaurant shows us that my off-the-cuff guess was largely correct. Zooming in on their handy map even gives us a nice rough set of directions: go along the Gary Highway until you reach the turnoff for the David Carnegie Road, and you will be at the least McColonised place in Australia.

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! ---

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.

McDonalds restaurants (per capita) by country

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Vermont?

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)

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

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