Urban History/Transportation Project

[Motor1560]

I am part of a project called Mapping_Rails. We are using Google Earth as a front end to research and document the street and interurban railways of the Los Angeles area. These railways were the backbone that determined the spatial urban growth of the area and their influence is still being felt today as Southern California struggles with the traffic monster.

Google Earth provides us a vehicle (pun intended) to collaborate with each other and share our work with the broader world. We're lucky in that GE has such high resolution coverage of our study area and, since most of the activity took place between about 1900 to the 1960's, there are still plenty of traces left on the ground and as artifacts in the built environment.

It is these two factors, collaboration and sharing, that, that I feel are an important part of the potential of GE in education; .