America's roadside signs are going dark one by one. Echoes in Neon maps every one that's left — and remembers the ones that aren't. Four fates, one map: still lit, brought back, moved to safety, or lost. Scrub a century of light, and follow the build. On Mapbox.
pk. token into index.html.No search box, no menus to wade through. You wander a dark map of the country, clusters break apart as you zoom, and a sign card slides up the moment you tap a glowing pin — its story, whether it still burns, and whether it came back.
Drag the timeline from 1910 to today and the landscape rewrites itself: watch neon bloom across Route 66 through the 1950s, wink out sign by sign — then flicker back on where a town brought one home. Every pin is colored by fate: cyan still lit, green restored, gold relocated, pink lost.
The first cut was a frozen demo — hardcoded signs, a road-trip planner that only pretended to route. This rebuild runs on real data and really plans the trip.
We added Restored — the comeback. It's computed from a sign's history, not just tagged: a dark or lost record, then operational again. The optimism is something the map figures out.
Signs live in the Habitus data layer — each with a stable identity, resolved to the map where it still stands — national in scope, growing continuously, not 30 rows baked into the page.
A bespoke night style in Studio, and one tileset colored by status with a data-driven expression — the four states fall out of the data, not four layers.
Studio · GL JS · data-driven stylingSearch Box resolves any town to a stable place id, so the dataset shares one clean spatial key end to end.
Search Box APIEnter two cities and it draws a true driving route, then surfaces every surviving sign within the corridor.
Before: simulated. Now: real."Three days, Tulsa to Flagstaff, neon motels and diners." A natural-language search on the Mapbox MCP Server paces it into a routable, savable trip.
Mapbox MCP ServerThe whole rebuild is documented in the open — every style decision, every agent prompt, every dead end — from today to the stage at BUILD with Mapbox, Sept 15–17, 2026. The talk is the arrival, not the kickoff. Follow it on the Road to BUILD.
Echoes shares its data with Neon Mile — the after-dark night-drive down the corridor. Same tileset, a filter, not a fork.
This page ships. New Studio night style drafted. Route 66 corridor + first verified signs land in the Habitus data layer.
The map-first discovery loop and century timeline go live. The four states — including restored — compute from sign history.
Mapbox routing + the MCP Server wired in. Natural-language trips, saved itineraries, export to GPX and calendar.
Mobile polish, the story told from the stage: how a stalled demo became a living map.
A sign goes dark every week. The least we can do is remember where the light was — and celebrate the ones that came back.
Follow the build →A way to follow along — the Sign Post — is coming. We'll add a spot to sign up once it's ready.