The Streets - and Hills - of San Francisco

Barry A. Klinger
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San Francisco is one of those cities whose geography you can not understand unless you are aware of the dramatic hills that stretch across large parts of it. Yet it is hard to find a good map that captures the main roads and other landmarks as well as the topography.

I wanted a map that

• Showed streets
• Showed hills
• …for all of San Francisco
• Was pleasing to look at (not too cluttered, not too sparse)
• Showed elevations (not just shading to indicate slopes)
• Included selected street names and landmarks
• Had a grid to help judge distances

Here is a “small” version of the map:

This shows some features that may not be obvious to people who are not very familiar with San Francisco geography (and perhaps even to some who are):

1. The steep hill in the center of town shows a much more complex topography than simply “Twin Peaks”, with 3 or more (depending on what you count) peaks besides the (three!) peaks of Twin Peaks.
2. Those hills sit on a wider dome that slopes gently down in all directions.
3. A T-shaped ridge radiates north of the central hills and forms famous hills such as Pacific Heights, Russian Hill, Nob Hill and – arguably – Telegraph Hill, which is a little separated from the others.
4. A couple of narrow but tall hills radiate from the northeast corner of the central hill. These are “Buena Vista” and “Mt Olympus” (yes, that is its name). These are southeast of Golden Gate Park and the Haight. Buena Vista (“Good View”) is home to a park of the same name, SF’s oldest (created in 1867) and 3rd largest.
5. The Mission District is bordered to south and east by Bernal Heights and Potrero Hill, which together form another crescent emanating from the central hills.
6. Much of the eastern and northern 1/6th of the city is less than 25 feet abov sealevel.
7. The hills of Lincoln Park – at the western end of Geary Blvd – are separated from all the other hills in the city.

The “real version” of the map (a 9 MByte PNG file) is designed for a two-foot wide poster and includes all streets, though streets not included in the small version are not labelled in the complete version. Note that the labels are optimized for smaller (relative to image size) labels which do not overlap on the real version; the small version shown above has some overlapping labels.

Part of the full version of the map is at top of this post. Here is another segment:

I compared the filled contour maps above to a perspective picture of San Francisco topography, as seen from above the southeast of the city. The vertical relief – 800 feet or less in real life – is greatly exaggerated for visibility. This view does a great job of giving the reader a feel for the overall contours of the cities hills. The topography looks a bit like an amoeba stretching out pseudopods.

While the 3D image is arresting, it does not provide any information that is not already plainly visible in the other map, and it is harder to tell the exact distance/direction of one feature from another. I would like to figure out how to superimpose the roads on the topography, so that they climb up and down the hills in the perspective diagram, but that will have to wait for another day.

I also created a map of the rest of the peninsula. It is not as detailed but shows major roads and the mountain chain on the west half of the pensinula.