A short piece in The New Yorker from Adam Gopnik about Proposal 5, which appeared on the New York City general election ballot last November. It called for a unified single digital city map maintained by the Department of City Planning, rather than a hodgepodge of maps held at the borough level. Gopnik:

Proposal 5 was actually a bit of skilled electoral craft on the part of the city’s map functionaries. (They exist.) There has been a digitized map of New York for nearly twenty-five years. The extended map, however, will add to its already rich inventory of features some street-specific ones that, for ancient and complicated reasons, have been jealously guarded on thousands of paper maps by the five borough presidents. Though no one in the know will say, exactly, that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps, you do get the strong impression that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps. Now street names, lines, and widths across the city will all be available on one consolidated official digital map.

From there Gopnik chases thoughtfulness by segueing to some national-level generalities, but I took the opportunity to poke at Proposal 5, which passed 73.6 percent to 26.4 percent. The main opposition came, as it seems to do with most things NYC, from the contrarian oasis of Staten Island. (See the precinct-level results map from “Fiveminutecrafts” on Wikipedia.)