When former Google executive Sep Kamvar moved from San Francisco to Cambridge, Mass., he began to notice small differences between the two cities, many of them the result of policy decisions he thought were under-appreciated.

“I thought it would be really interesting  to create maps of each of these little decisions that we make,” he said.

Kamvar, who runs the social computing research group in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, decided he would try making 10,000 maps, 100 each for 100 cities, using publicly available data. He wanted the maps to relate to people’s lives, and he called it You Are Here. He started with maps about biking. “I bike to work and I feel like I’m about to get hit almost every time I bike to work, which was really the inspiration for that,” he said. 

One of the cities Kamvar and his staff selected was D.C. and they have now produced 10 D.C. maps, all of them interactive, about the way people live, work, eat and get around in Washington. He said the District is unique in a number of ways, including how much of the city can be quickly reached by bike and how many of the immigrants on work visas are working in education, rather than technology.

Below are sample images of the the 10 maps. To use the maps, go to You Are Here.

1. The best way to get where you’re going

Choose any location on this map and see how best to get anywhere in the District most quickly from where you are. For the section of downtown selected below, the immediate area (green) is best reached by walking and much of the rest of downtown (orange) is best reached by biking. Outer neighborhoods are most accessible by public transit (blue) or driving (red).

2. Which neighborhoods have the best public transportation?

With this map, researchers compare the time it takes to get from any chosen point to the rest of the city by transit versus how long it takes by driving. Darker areas are places where driving is far more efficient than riding transit, while lighter areas have more efficient transit. Every location is ranked on a 1-10 scale from poor transit (0) to excellent transit (10).

3. Street greenery

Using Google Street View images, Kamvar’s team approximates the level of tree and plant life on each street in the city, with some variance for seasonal changes. The map shows a striking predominance of the urban canopy in Upper Northwest, west of Rock Creek Park, a difference that has been supported by other research.

4. When are things open?

This map visualizes when businesses open over a 24-hour period by lighting businesses when they open and darkening them when they close. The view below shows where things are open at 9:34 in the morning.

 5. Where are the rats?

Kamvar and his staff charted 2,825 complaints about rodents — one assumes most are rats — and compared their population with the number of people in the neighborhoods. They found that the rodent population is concentrated in Wards 1, 4 and 5, particularly when compared with the number of people there. Wards 3 and 8 had the least complaints.

6. The origin countries of Washington’s immigrant workers

This map tracks 345 permanent visa applications for work in D.C. from 2012 to 2013, tracing their country of origin. It includes the industries, job titles and employers of the applications, and whether they were accepted or not.

7. The foods D.C. restaurants are serving

After reviewing the language on 447,542 menu items from 4,091 restaurants in D.C., researchers created a circular chart demonstrating how foods from cheese to peas are paired with cooking terms such as ‘fresh,’ ‘grilled’ or ‘crispy.’ Roll over the chart and it shows how one might find a very specifically described dish. Do you like avocado paired with bacon? Of all menu items, 10.14 percent of those mentioning ‘avocado’ also mention ‘bacon,’ and they can be found in 1,219 dishes from 935 restaurants, which are listed.

8. Food deserts

With the opening of more than a dozen new grocery stores and farmer’s markets in recent years, there are fewer areas of the city — termed food deserts — where fresh foods are not easily available, but they still exist. Green indicates areas within close walking distance to fresh foods; red indicates food deserts.

9. Where are people using Capital Bikeshare?

This map visualizes a day’s worth of trips taken using bikes from the region’s bike-sharing system, Capital Bikeshare, in 2013. Individual riders are represented by green dots. The most popular route? A ride along the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial.

10. Where is the Capital Bikeshare system out of balance?

Bike-sharing only works because its operators drive vans carrying bikes to stations that have run out of bikes. The most efficient stations have a similar number of riders arriving and departing, thus requiring little or no re-balancing. With each circle representing a bike-sharing station, this map shows the usage and imbalance of the bikes during one day. Blue indicates more bikes are leaving than arriving; red the opposite.

Follow Jonathan O’Connell on Twitter: @oconnellpostbiz