Rural Cartography, Part III

Over 500 rural communities in Georgia are being removed from a new map - created by that state's Department of Transportation - because lazy cartographers claim that there is not enough room to fit their placenames. Never mind that Rand McNally, AAA, Thomas Guides and other companies have kept the names intact with creative typography. Apparently the Georgia DOT only has one font size on their computer: too big.

Boingboing.com reports that such communities as Roosterville, Cloudland, Hemp, Due West (a decent-sized college town), Poetry Tulip and Po Biddy Crossroads have all been left off this new map. Sorry guys - your towns no longer exist. The Associated Press reports:

A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.

awesome image appropriated from Boing Boing