At the top of the page, is a time slider. Moving the slider left-to-right moves the information displayed on the map forwards in time. 

As the date progresses, the buildings on the map are removed to make way for highways, which appear on the map on the date they opened to traffic.

The Buildings Cleared counter, on the upper right of the page, displays information on the numbers of buildings removed, and below, the Displaced Residents box totals the number of people who were displaced.

Each building is also color coded on the map by type of building: residential, commercial, religious, etc. Hover over a to display the type and more details.

Below Displaced Residents, the two buttons toggle between information derived from linked Census Rolls, which connect exact residents directly to the addresses of the buildings on the map, or our Census Estimate which gives our best approximation of the total number of people displaced. For more details about these two methodologies and how they differ, see article 2, “Methodology.”

To display this information on the map, toggle on the Demographics button, which shows displaced residents as dots on the map. The denser the dots, the denser the residents displaced. Toggling between Census Rolls and Census Estimate changes the data displayed.

Hovering over each structure on the map brings up information about that building—its address, function, and name, as well as, who lived there or our best estimate.

When selecting a building, details about the people who lived there will be displayed in the Building History pane on the right of the page, if our research has discovered who lived there. Scrolling up and down on the building pane, displays each resident’s name, age, race, and their relationship with each other. Select the date of the information from either the 1940 census or the 1950 census.

As the time slider moves forwards and backwards, information tied to that time will appear on the map. Hovering over the blue and orange Views dots display a photograph from that period and projection of the area of the city depicted in the photograph.

All the historical photographs can be browsed by opening the Media pane at the bottom of the page and selecting Views (the camera icon). Selecting a photograph will relocate the map to the part of Houston in the photograph.

The Document icons on the map connect to newspaper articles or other important documents related to the history of highway construction. These documents can also be browsed in the Media pane under Documents (the paper icon).

There are three other sets of sources that can be displayed on the map in the Media pane: Aerials, Maps, and Plans. Aerials (the plane icon) are georeferenced composites of overhead aerial photography of the city from 1938 through 1992. The Maps (the map icon) tab shows a collection of historical maps of Houston. Last, the Plans tab (the ruler icon) shows the complete collection of highway and street planning maps from 1942 to 1980 used to create Houston’s freeway system. When selecting an aerial image, a map, or plan from the Media pane, the opacity of the display can be adjusted to compare that source to our map of highways and buildings.

On the right of the page, useful Overlays can be added to the display, that will help demonstrate the factors that contributed to the routing of Houston’s freeways, including redlined residential areas, previous highways, railroads, historical Black neighborhoods, industrial parts of town, and the city’s historical wards.

The final button on right of the page, Articles, opens a menu of our in-depth articles and analysis of this history, including a brief introduction to the research, the methodology for constructing the map and the displacement estimates, the history of highway planning and structural racism in Houston, and the consequences of freeway construction.

Also, on the right of the page, the Important Maps menu includes the most essential maps for understanding the development of the Houston freeway system: 1929 maps of Houston Race Distribution and Proposed Race Restriction Areas, the 1930s H.O.L.C. Redling Map, the 1949 and 1953 Proposed Freeway Maps. For more information on why each of these maps is important, see article 3, “History.”

Last, the Info button in the extreme upper right of the page, opens our About panel, which explains the project and contains our contact information, and Citation panel, which lists our sources for the map and database and gives instructions for citing RoadsTaken.