Why Every Map Has This Tiny Australian Town

Never actively thought about this before. Yokohama is also a huge victim of the Balitmore effect with 3.7m population living just down the coast from Tokyo

Terry Pratchett regularly jokes about this phenomenon, with phrasing like "one of those places that only had a name to avoid the embarrassment of leaving large blank spaces on the map".

Back in the 1970s, my dad was an air compressor salesman, and his area included Minnesota and Manitoba. He once had to make a sales call to Churchill, Manitoba. He was surprised to learn he had to take the train. Churchill is on the shore of Hudson Bay, and is a long way from anything else, over terrain that is marsh, lakes, granite, and occasional permafrost. Even keeping the rail open is an effort. My dad looked at the railroad map, and saw labelled stops, every sixty miles or so. "The towns certainly are spread out, up here." "No," he was told. "Those aren't towns. Those are the names of the guys who live there."

I first went to Alice about fifty years ago. At that time ATMs all had a sign saying “if this machine is out of order the nearest machine is …..”. The one at Alice said “if this machine is out of order the nearest machine is at Port Augusta 1226 km away”.

Saskylakh, Russia (population - 2317) is visible on Google Maps even when Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Delhi and Beijing are already missing

Currently living in Alice and love this about the town ☺️

Well to be fair Alice Springs is genuinely world famous. So many tourists go there to visit Uluru. It’s not a cartographic anomaly, e.g. weather reports too always feature Alice Springs. It’s like the Galapagos, Cuzco, and Petra, they’re all super famous despite their small populations.

Its important to note that on that map you see a major road running from Adelaide to darwin, and it runs right through alice, in outback Australia any town big enough to hold a service station is kind of a big deal...

This video is excellent but no one's mentioning how nice it is that this dude comes in, makes his point, and then concludes the video. No filler, no nonsense. Good info in a good size

Wild that you can't see Seoul in that last shot (3:54) but you can see Alice Springs.

I mean, considering the fact that Alice Springs is set dead center in of a desert that most people completely avoid because most of it's borderline uninhabitable; 25,000 people may as well be New York City to them.

If I'm in Australia and I need the amenities of a mid sized town, knowing where Alice Springs is is probably very important. I reckon they have things like hardware stores, supermarkets, gas stations and hospitals. It is an oasis, and an oasis deserves infinitely more attention than a metropolis because you're not dependent on the latter.

There's also a big tourist situation given that it's the largest air connection to Uluru. Which also explains Exmouth and Port Douglas being on that zoom (population about 3k-4k) and the existence of Yulara (population about 800 off season). Though Kununurra, Derby and Karratha are stranger anomalies, as they're not quite as touristy as the other places I've mentioned, and have a similar population.

The biggest example of this is if on maps you go to Greenland you can see Summit camp a station with 5-38 people, meanwhile Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, with a metropolitan population of 23M is not labeled in favour the name of the country. Funnily enough Nuuk, the capital and biggest city of Greenland is not labeled in favour of nothing, even though there is space to write Nuuk.

While your point still stands valid, Alice Springs is also super famous not just for Uluru, but also as a weather station. I'm from Germany, and in our Geography classes, when we learned about climate zones, Alice Springs was also the example for hot dry continental weather :D As a 14 year old, I could name and show Alcie Springs on a map, but didn't know Canberra existed.

As someone who grew up in the DC area, I find it kind of hilarious that Baltimore's label disappears before Fairfax. That's an artifact of the label appearing above the dot--Baltimore is to the north; Fairfax is to the west.

I find that big international disaster movies often have no idea where towns in Australia are and show strange locations

Alice Springs might only have 25,000 people but it has a major highway The Stuart Highway, and is a major stop for the Adelaide to Darwin Rain Network with The Ghan train. It is actually more important than a lot of other places in Australia being a central connection point.

As a retired cartographer, we used to call this using our "cartographic license". It's not just generalization. There is also a priority on what gets put down first and what gets offset, though that's more an issue with hard copy maps than digital maps. Roads and rail lines often follow shorelines and decisions need to be made when all need to be seen. At larger scales (i.e., more zoomed in) there are also decisions to be made on roads vs buildings for example. Never heard this called the Baltimore Effect though.

Remember a story were tiny town somewhere in Australia got a donation/grant to build a massive library due to this. The philanthropists were looking for a suitable place to build a library and saw the name of the town on a world map thinking it was big enough for the library but in fact there was just plenty of space to write the name of the town and nothing of note within a 1000km and so the cartographers went big.