Driving While Distracted

Bloomberg has created an animated map to visualize the number of cars driving on our roads controlled by drivers using mobile phones. In the USA around 3,000 people a year are killed as a result of drivers being distracted while using their phones. In How Bad is Distracted Driving? Bloomberg has managed to visualize the scale of the distracted driving problem in New York and Los Angeles using two animated maps.

The two separate maps display a large number of cars driving around New York and Los Angeles. Some of the cars on each map are colored red and some are colored black. The percentage of red cars on each map represents the average percentage of drivers who drive around that city while distracted by their mobile phones. The resulting map is a very original and effective visualization of the data and really helps to convey the scale of the distracted driving problem.

The Bloomberg article also includes two other maps of New York and Los Angeles. The second set of maps presents a heat map view of each city's roads. On these maps roads are colored to show the percentage of drivers recorded on those roads driving while using their phones. The maps therefore show which roads have the highest percentage of distracted drivers.

The data for all four maps comes from the smartphone driving platform TrueMotion. TrueMotion tracks the usage of phones while their owners are driving. The TrueMotion application is used by the customers of a number of insurance companies. These customers are given incentives by the insurance companies when they agree to have their phone usage tracked while they are driving.