I tend to think of myself as knowing my city fairly well, having been around it now for over a decade and travelling around it quite a bit, especially when I was single and more prone to going out (that said, married life with kids has taken me other places in the city to which I would not have ventured as a single person, so my experiences, while probably less diverse within the last few years, have grown wider in the total sum of my time in town than they would have had my life continued as it had).
I decided not so much to draw a mental map as to draw a map of the streets I actually traveled in a given week. The thicker the line, the more often I traveled it (by walking, car, or bus). What's interesting to me about this map is how thick the lines are toward home (even compared with work). We live at a dead end, so unless the destination is home, there's little reason to come or go from there. If I'm out, I'm likely to run several errands at once rather than returning home. Still, one can be guaranteed to travel the seldom-traveled dead end road at least twice each time one comes and goes out--in other words, almost always at least twice a day. Hence, while work may be more centrally located, it is not someplace I travel on weekends, and the variety of roads that can take me there also means I travel different routes depending on the bus I take or whether I drive or walk.
Certainly, were I to have drawn this map five years ago, in the waning days of singledom, it would have looked different, or six years ago when I worked in a different location. Living in a more central area of the city at that time, the lines would have been thick near home as well--and I would have expected that, because of its very centrality. But what this map shows is that home (even more than a given city center) is generally always central. For my family and for me personally, our little dead end is a heavy-traffic road.
