Do you see a tram? You’re in East Berlin.

Lisa Charlotte Muth

Today, we launched a few big features for our locator maps. The most important addition: You can now import areas & lines. Which basically means you can do everything. Everything! Like importing the historical Berlin wall from this Github Gist & the Tram lines from OpenStreetMap to show the following:

Berlin has a great subway & bus network – but at least in some parts of the city, it also has a tram network. As you can see on the map above, the 22 tram lines only exist in former East Berlin, with two small exceptions. One might think that these tram lines were all built during GDR times between 1949 and 1990. And that West Berlin just never bothered constructing a tram network. But the opposite is the case:

There were already 93 tram lines by 1929, in both East and West Berlin. After the Second World War, the West Berlin administration decided that trams are outdated and replaced them with subway lines and busses. East Berlin kept them, and they still exist to this date. (As someone who uses them multiple times a week, I’m really happy about that.)

To learn more how to import areas (like the Berlin wall) or lines (like the tram network) to Datawrapper locator maps, have a look at this Academy article: “How to import area & line markers”. Also, definitely check out that great fire camp map Gregor created for the announcement blog post. And here’s another announcement: Starting next week, we’ll look at some of the best charts that Datawrapper users have created during 2018. Very excited for that. See you then!

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Lisa Charlotte Muth

(she/her, @lisacmuth, @lisacmuth@vis.social) is Datawrapper’s head of communications. She writes about best practices in data visualization and thinks of new ways to excite you about charts and maps. Lisa lives in Berlin.

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