City Street Network Orientation

 

The City Street Network Orientation infographic represents 25 of the United States' largest cities and the direction of their streets. The data is shown by using a polar histogram, which show the direction of the streets (based on their cardinal orientation) and their frequency (the length on the graph). The infographic was created by Geoff Boeing, Urban planning professor at Northeastern University.

Using OpenStreetMap data, Geoff Boeing charted the orientation distributions of major cities:

"Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar’s directionrepresents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings."

So you can easily spot the gridded street networks, and then there’s Boston and Charlotte that are a bit nutty. Check out Boeing’s other chart for orientation of major non-US cities.

See also Stephen Von Worley’s color-coded maps and Seth Kadish’s charts from 2014 that showed the same thing but used Census data instead of OpenStreetMap.

Found on Flowing Data

Extremely Detailed 2016 Election Map

The New York Times has published An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, and it's fascinating to explore! 

Their full article, Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity: Highlights From a Very Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, examines some of the more interesting patterns, insights and inconsistencies.

The election results most readers are familiar with are county maps like the ones we produce at The Times on election night. But votes are cast at a much finer unit of geography — in precincts, which may contain thousands of voters but in some cases contain only a handful. Our previous election maps contained results for about 3,100 counties; here we show results for more than 168,000 voting precincts.

The interactivity is really well done, made possible through the integration with MapBox, and you can zoom in to view the data down to the smallest voting precincts. Pop-up information will tell you the exact number of votes at the precinct level.

Here's an animated journey (accelerated) around the country to 14 major cities:

Animated Visualization of First Leaf Appearance

Spring is coming! Jeremy White at the NY Times has animated data from the USA National Phenology Network showing the average dates of "first leaf" across the U.S.

In some cases, an animated data visualziation is better at communicating the data to the audience than a static design. This animation clearly shows the progression of Spring across the country and you can understand the data within seconds.

The Texas Infographic

Happy Texas Independence Day! March 2, 1836 was when when sixty delegates signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. This event marked Texas’ independence from Mexico.

The Texas Infographic was a joint project between History.com and NeoMam Studios as a summary of the major facts about Texas.

The layout is a little jumbled for my taste, but the key facts are all included. I prefer a clear story path so the readers know where to look to follow the information.

Eclipse: What You Need To Know

What are your plans to view the eclipse today? The Eclipse: What You Need To Know infographic from Forbes contributor and designer Kevin Anderton.

On August the 21st 2017, there will be a solar eclipse in the sky over the United States. If you are like me, you are planning on enjoying this amazing site and you have probably also heard that there is some danger in viewing it. Here is some information that will help you safely enjoy the eclipse next Monday.

Landslide for the "Did Not Vote" Candidate in the 2016 Election!

From BrilliantMaps, this is the Did Not Vote Election Map, showing the magnitude if all voting-eligible adults that did not actively vote in the 2016 Presidential election. A Presidential candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes to win. The "Did Not Vote" candidate would have have gathered 41% of the total votes from the voting eligible population, and 471 votes from the Electoral College! A Landslide!

The map above shows what the 2016 US Presidential Election results would have been if votes not cast for Hillary, Trump or one of the third party candidates had gone to fictional candidate “Did Not Vote.”

 As a percentage of eligible voters, Clinton received 28.43% (65,845,063) of all votes compared to Trump’s 27.20% (62,980,160) and Did Not Vote’s 44.37%(102,731,399).

Total voter turnout was estimated to be 55.3% of the voting age population and 59.0% of the voting eligible population.

Map created using 270 To Win, based on reddit user Taillesskangaru’s posts here and updated here.

Disclaimer: The map above was accurate as of January 17th, 2017. Totals below were true at the time of writing but may no longer currently be accurate as additional votes and recounts are conducted.

Thanks to Mike Wirth for sharing on Facebook!

Every Total Solar Eclipse in your Lifetime

With the upcoming eclipse moving across the U.S. in August, Denise Lu at the Washington Post has created some fantastic visualizations of Every Total Solar Eclipse Happening in your Lifetime.

On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible from the contiguous United States. It’ll be the first to traverse coast to coast in nearly a century. There will be 69 total solar eclipses visible from somewhere on the planet in the next 100 years, but only a few will be visible from North America. See how many total solar eclipses are left in your lifetime:

The path of totality for the eclipse in August stretches from coast to coast — passing over Oregon in the west and moving all the way across the country to South Carolina in the east. This is a rare event; it’s the first time the path of totality will eclipse only over the contiguous United States.

The interactive globe visualization is fascinating. Enter your birth year, and it plots all of the solar eclipses that have occurred and will occur during your expected lifetime across the globe.

Thanks to FlowingData and Chiqui Esteban

Planes, Trains & Automobiles of U.S. Presidents

Official Vehicles of the President of the United States is an infographic from TitleMax showing the evolution of the vehicles used by Presidents throughout our history.

When the POTUS (President of the Unite States) has to get around, he usually does it in style. And if he’s not in style, at least we know that he’s often surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of security detail.

Yes, for the U.S. president, cars and vehicles have always been expensive, as has been Air Force One. History has put a spotlight on the presidents’ one-of-a-kind planes: mobile White Houses, with all of the protections therein.

This information is much better shown visually like this infographic than a text bullet list. I would like to see them placed on a timeline to better line them up and show where their use overlapped.

The infographic itself is missing a copyright statement, a citation of sources, and the URL for readers to be able to find the origial full-size infographic published by TitleMax.

Found on Infographic Journal

Thanksgiving Flight Patterns

Thanksgiving Flight Patterns is a cool animated, interactive data visualization from the NY Times TheUpshot that looks at where people traveled to for the Thanksgiving holiday last week. On the interactive version on the NY Times site, you can hover over any included city to see only those connections. There was a huge surge of people headed to Florida!

Thanksgiving is known as a time to return home to family, with the holiday calling to mind images of grandmother’s house. But for many Americans, it’s also now a chance to go on vacation.

This week, Florida will see a surge in the number of people arriving by plane. Las Vegas is another popular destination. Much more than is commonly realized, Thanksgiving is a time to seek out sun (and gambling), in addition to (or possibly instead of) catching up with loved ones.

These conclusions emerge from The Upshot’s analysis of search data from Google Flights. In all, more than 3.6 million Americans — or slightly more than 1 percent of the country’s population — are expected to take a flight for Thanksgiving.

I really like the design choice to change the colors at both ends of each line. It really helps to see the traffic departing a city in comparison to the traffic arriving. 

I think the animation of the dots moving along the flight paths in the interactive version was unnecessary.

Visual History of US Population

Nathan Yau from FlowingData has created a cool, new animated data visualization, Two Centuries of Population, Animated. The visualization shows the growth and spread of 

You’ve likely seen the population density map of the United States in one form or another. A lot of people per square mile reside in big cities, fewer people reside in suburban areas, and a lot fewer people reside in rural areas. Cities weren’t always cities though. Rural wasn’t always rural. If you look at people per square mile over a couple of centuries, you get a better idea of how the country developed.

The animated map above shows population density by decade, going back to 1790 and up to recent estimates for 2015. The time in between each time period represents a smoothed transition. This is approximate, but it gives a better idea of how the distribution of population changed.

Nerd Notes:

• Nathan used R to generate the maps and FFmpeg to string the images into a video.
• Data are originally from the Census Bureau but made much more accessible by NHGIS.