Tomorrow and Thursday, an estimated 43.4 million Americans will travel to celebrate Thanksgiving with their loved, hated and annoyed ones. According to NASA, 90 percent will travel by road, and the rest will use airplanes and trains. Here are the roads, train tracks and flight paths they will take.
The photo above shows the road traffic as captured from space by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radio on the Suomi NPP satellite. According to NASA:
The United States has more roads—4.1 million miles (6.6 million kilometers)—than any other nation in the world, and roughly 40 percent more than second-ranked India. About 47,000 of those U.S. miles are part of the Interstate Highway System, established by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. The country also has 127,000 miles (204,000 kilometers) of railroad tracks and about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) of navigable rivers and canals (not including the Great Lakes).
The numbers are staggering. The view of the flightpaths—as visualized by Aaron Koblin at its peak time—is impressive too.
An estimated three million people will travel in airplanes, according to airlines' projections.
The rest will use the railroads. Here's a view of the railroads combined with the roads by our friend Félix Pharand-Deschênes at Globaïa.