// the find
rhiever/optimal-roadtrip-usa
Contains maps for the article, "Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S." and similar articles
A restoration of Randal Olson's 2015-2018 'optimal road trip' interactive maps, which broke after Google required billing for Maps API calls. This rebuilds every map as a fully static page using OSRM-routed OpenStreetMap data and Protomaps vector tiles instead of live Google Maps calls, so it's for anyone who wants the nostalgia maps working again, not really for anyone building new software.
Zero runtime dependency on a paid external API is the actual fix here, and it's done properly: pinned OSM snapshot per map in trip.json, vendored PMTiles basemaps, fonts and icons all shipped in-repo so nothing can rot externally again. Original URLs and filenames are preserved so years of blog embeds and bookmarks keep working, which is the kind of unglamorous detail that's easy to skip and wasn't. Licensing is handled correctly per data source (ODbL for OSM-derived routes, CC BY for Olson's original text, separate BSD/OFL/MIT for each vendored library) instead of slapping one blanket license on everything.
The actual build pipeline that generates these pages is explicitly private — this repo is just static output, so you can't regenerate or audit how the stop data was re-verified or how routing decisions were made, you just get to trust the README. Repo size is going to be rough: a 51MB lower-48 basemap plus per-glyph-range .pbf files for multiple Noto Sans variants (hundreds of small blobs per font) checked straight into git with no LFS mentioned. There's no code here in any real sense — no tests, no CI, nothing to review for correctness beyond reading JSON config — so 'Language: HTML' is accurate but this is a data/content repo wearing a software repo's topics list.