Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. File Photo by Peter Foley/UPI | License Photo
Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer's disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.
These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps.
I have spent more than two decades staring at maps. Not paper maps on a wall, but digital ones with multiple layers: flood boundaries draped over census blocks, car crash hot spots plotted against road geometry, and satellite readings of rainfall stitched across river basins.
Much of my work as a civil and environmental engineer is done through GIS -- that is, geographic information systems. Engineers like me hold several spatial relationships in their minds at once, reasoning about where things sit relative to one another across scales ranging from a city block to a whole watershed.
