maps – Page 3 – Coffee Spoons

A New Downtown Arena for Philadelphia?

I woke up this morning and the breaking news was that the local basketball team, the 76ers, proposed a new downtown arena just four blocks from my office. The article included a graphic showing the precise location of the site.

I have no doubt whatsoever this won’t impact my commutes.

For our purposes this is just a little locator map in a larger article. But I wanted to draw attention to two things in an otherwise nice map. First, if you look carefully on the left you can see the label for the Broad Street Line placed over the actual railway line, which is what makes it so difficult to read. I probably would have shifted the label to the left to increase its legibility.

Second, and this is a common for maps of Philadelphia, is the actual north-south route of said Broad Street Line, one of the three subway lines running in the city. (You all know of the Broad Street and Market–Frankford Elevated, but don’t forget the PATCO.) If you look closely enough it appears to run directly underneath Broad Street in a straight line. But where it passes beneath City Hall you will see the little white dot locating the station is placed to the left of the railway line.

Why is that?

Well when it was built, Philadelphia’s City Hall was the tallest habitable building in the world. Whilst clearly supplanted in that record, the building remains the largest free-standing masonry building in the world. But that means it has deep and enormous foundations. Foundations that could not be disturbed when the city was running a subway line directly beneath Broad Street.

Consequently, the Broad Street Line is not actually straight—ride it heading south into City Hall Station and you’ll notice the sharp turn both in its bend and the loud screeching of metal. The line bends around parts of the building’s foundations, sharply on the north side and more gently on the south side. So the actual station is still beneath City Hall, but offset to the west.

But most of the time it’s easier just to depict the route as a straight line running directly beneath City Hall.

Credit for the piece goes to John Duchneskie.

Small Dog Days of Summer

For my readers in the northern hemisphere, which is the vast majority of you, we are in the middle of meteorological summer, the dog days. And whilst my UK and Europe readers continue to bake under temperatures greater than 40ºC (104ºF), the northeast United States and Philadelphia in particular is looking at a heatwave starting today that’s forecast to peak at a temperature of 38ºC (100ºF) this weekend and a heat index reaching 41ºC (106ºF) tomorrow.

Not cool.

Yesterday we examined a completely different topic, property tax increases in Philadelphia, but we contrasted that work with a heat index map from the New York Times. With the heatwave beginning this afternoon, however, it seemed apropos to revisit that contrasting article.

It begins with the map that we looked at yesterday. Of course yesterday was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday, and so you can already compare these two maps to see how and where the heat has shifted. Spoiler: the Southeast and Midwest.

It does so with a nice simple three-colour unidirectional spectrum from a light yellow to a burnt orange. And you can see the orange spreading up from the Gulf Coast and along the southeastern Atlantic Seaboard.

For those not familiar, the heat index is basically what the air “feels like” taking into consideration the actual temperature and the relative humidity in the air. Humans cool themselves via perspiration and when the air is excessively humid our ability to perspire decreases and thus the body begins to run hotter. Warmer temperatures allow the atmosphere to increase the amount of moisture it can contain and you can see all that Gulf and subtropical moisture carrying itself into the hot air moving up from the south.

Very not cool.

The piece also offers a look at the forecast for the heat index, showing the next six days. These small multiples allow the reader to see the geographic progression of the heat. Whereas today will be particularly for parts of the Midwest in southern Illinois and Indiana, tomorrow will see the worst for the Eastern Seaboard. Luckily the heat index retreats a bit, though as I noted above, the temperatures will continue to rise until Sunday, meaning higher temperatures, but lower relative humidity. For Philadelphia in particular we talking about 50% relative humidity tomorrow and only 35% on Sunday. That makes a big difference.

Overall this is a great piece despite the content.

Personally, I just can’t wait until summer.

Credit for the piece goes to Matthew Bloch, Lazaro Gamio, Zach Levitt, Eleanor Lutz, and John-Michael Murphy.

Legendary Adjustments

The other day I was reading an article about the coming property tax rises in Philadelphia. After three years—has anything happened in those three years?—the city has reassessed properties and rates are scheduled to go up. In some neighbourhoods by significant amounts. I went down the related story link rabbit hole and wound up on a Philadelphia Inquirer article I had missed from early May that included a map of just where those increases were largest. The map itself was nothing crazy.

We have a choropleth with city zip codes coloured by the percentage increase. I was thrown for a bit of a loop as I immediately perceived the red representing lower values and green higher values, the standard green to red palette. But given that higher values are “bad”, I can live red representing bad and sitting at the top of the spectrum.

I filed it away to review later, but when I returned I visited on my mobile phone. And what I saw broadly looked the same, but there was a disconcerting difference. Take a look at the legend.

You can see that instead of running vertically like it did on the desktop, now the legend runs horizontally across the bottom. In and of itself, that’s not the issue. Though I do wonder if this particular legend could have still worked in roughly the same spot/alignment given the geographic shape of Philadelphia along the Delaware River.

Rather look at the order. We go from the higher, positive values on the left to the negative, lower values on the right. When you read the legend, this creates some odd jumps. For example, we move from “+32% to +49%” then to “+15% to +31%”. We would normally say something to the point of the increase bins moving from “+15% to +31%” then to “+32% to +49%”. In other words, the legend itself is a continuum.

The fix for this would be to simply flip the running order of the legend. Put the lower values on the left and then step up to the right. For a quick comparison, I visited the New York Times website and pulled up the first graphic I could find that looked like a choropleth. Here we have a map of the dangerous temperatures across the United States.

Note how here the New York Times also runs their legend horizontally below the graphic. But instead of running high-to-low like in the Inquirer, the Times runs low-to-high, making for a more natural and intuitive legend.

This kind of simple ordering change would make the Inquirer’s map that much better.

Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to Kasturi Pananjady and John Duchneskie.

Credit for the Times piece goes to Matthew Bloch, Lazaro Gamio, Zach Levitt, Eleanor Lutz, and John-Michael Murphy.

Choo Choo

I took two weeks off as work was pretty crazy, but we’re back to covering data visualisation and design with a graphic about trains. And anybody who knows me knows how I love trains. One of the early acts of the Biden administration was funding a proper expansion of rail service in the United States.

Last week the Washington Post published an article that explored some of the difficulties Amtrak, the national rail company, faces in that expansion. Most of it has to deal with the fact that outside the Northeast Amtrak largely uses rail lines owned by freight companies.

The article uses a map to show Amtrak routes and, in particular, where Amtrak wants to increase service or create new service.

As far as the map goes, it does a nice job needing not to reinvent the wheel. When an existing route will have expanded service, e.g. the Northeast Corridor, the blue line sits next to the dotted white line. What remains a bit unclear to me is the use of black text for Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The bold type for New Orleans and Mobile makes sense because of the story’s focus on that particular route. Chicago is mentioned once, but Dallas is not. So that is unclear.

But what really stood out to me was what happened when I re-read the story on my mobile. The graphic split from a full map to three narrow graphics, each featuring 1/3 of the United States. The designers moved the text labels so that they are fully visible in each graphic.

Overall, the piece does a great job at showing the map, but in particular it shines when it swaps out the large map for the smaller graphics on small screens. And the attention to detail in moving the text labels makes it all the better.

Credit for the piece goes to Luz Lazo.

Turn Down the Heat

First, as we all should know, climate change is real. Now that does not mean that the temperature will always be warmer, it just means more extreme. So in winter we could have more severe cold temperatures and in hurricane season more powerful storms. But it does mean that in the summer we could have more frequent and hotter heat waves.

Enter the United States, or more specifically the North American continent. In this article from the BBC we see photographs of the way the current heatwave is playing out across the continent. But it opens up with a nice map. Well, nice as in nicely done, not as in this is actually nice weather.

The only complaint most of my American readers might have is that the numbers make no sense. That’s because it’s all in Celsius. Unfortunately for Americans most of the rest of the world uses Celsius and not Fahrenheit. Suffice it to say you don’t want to be in the dark reds. 44C equals 111F. 10C, the greenish-yellow side of the spectrum, is a quite pleasant 50F.

And that can relate to a small housekeeping note. I’m back after a long weekend up in the Berkshires. I took a short holiday to go visit the area near that north–south band of yellow over the eastern portion of the United States. It was very cool and windy and overall a welcome respite from the heat that will be building back in here across the eastern United States later this week.

At least yesterday was the summer solstice. The days start getting shorter. And in about five weeks or so we will reach the daily average peak temperature here in Philadelphia. At that point the temperatures begin cooling towards their eventual mid-January nadir.

I can’t wait.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

New Mexico Burns

Editor’s note: I was having some technical issues last week. This was supposed to post last week.

Editor’s note two: This was supposed to go up on Monday. Still didn’t. Third time’s the charm?

Yesterday I wrote about a piece from the New York Times that arrived on my doorstep Saturday morning. Well a few mornings earlier I opened the door and found this front page: a map of the western United States highlighting the state of New Mexico.

That doesn’t exactly look like a climate I’d enjoy.

Unlike the graphic we looked at yesterday, this graphic stretched down the page and below the fold, not by much, but still notably. The maps are good and the green–red spectrum passes the colour blind test. How the designer chose to highlight New Mexico is subtle, but well done. As the temperature and precipitation push towards the extreme, the colours intensify and call attention to those areas.

Also unlike the graphic we looked at yesterday, this piece contained some additional graphics on the inside pages.

Definitely not a place where I want to be.

These are also nicely done. Starting with the line chart at the bottom of the page, we can contrast this to some of the charts we looked at yesterday.

Here the designer used axis lines and scales to clearly indicate the scale of New Mexico’s wildfire problem. Not only can you see that the number of fires detected has spiked far above than the number in the previous years back to 2003. And not only is the number greater, the speed at which they’ve occurred is noticeably faster than most years. The designer also chose to highlight the year in question and then add secondary importance to two other bad years, 2011 and 2012.

The other graphics are also maps like on the front page. The first was a locator map that pointed out where the fires in question occurred. Including one isn’t much of a surprise, but what this does really nicely is show the scale of these fires. They are not an insignificant amount of area in the state.

Pointing out where I really don’t want to be in New Mexico.

Finally we have the main graphic of the piece, which is a map of the spread of the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fire, which was two separate fires until they merged into one. The article does a good job explaining how part of the fire was actually intentionally set as part of a controlled burn. It just became a bit uncontrolled shortly thereafter.

This reminded me of a piece I wrote about last autumn when the volcano erupted on La Palma. In that I looked at an article from the BBC covering the spread of the lava as it headed towards the coast. In that case darker colours indicated the earlier time periods. Here the Times reversed that and used the darker reds to indicate more recent fire activity.

Overall the article does a really nice job showing just what kind of problems New Mexico faces not just now from today’s environmental conditions, but also in the future from the effects of climate change.

Credit for the piece goes to Guilbert Gates, Nadja Popovich, and Tim Wallace.

Hidden Cities in the Amazon

Who did not like Indiana Jones growing up as a kid? Or better yet, stories of explorers like Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the lost city of Troy? The ancient world boasted a number of civilisations that no longer exist. But not all lost civilisations date back thousands of years. A recent article in Nature details how modern-day explorers used technology instead of trowels to discover urban centres dating only back 1500 years ago, the time at which Europe was just discovering the American continents.

The article includes a map of the elevations uncovered by LIDAR, which is like radar but with lasers. These wavelengths have the ability to penetrate the thick Amazonian jungle and reveal what sits upon the ground and the differences in height between them. This allows human-built structures to become rather apparent in contrast to the natural topography.

You can not only readily discern the pyramids and central civic/religious structures, but also the infrastructure like causeways, moats, and fortifications. They provide a fascinating insight into civilisations whose homelands are not easily accessible being that they are deep within the Amazon rain forest.

Here I like how the designers annotated at least a causeway, though I would also have enjoyed notes pointing out suppositions and hypotheses as to what the other structures may (or may not) be.

Credit for the piece goes to Heiko Prümers, Carla Jaimes Betancourt, José Iriarte, Mark Robinson, and Martin Schaich.

Kids Do the Darnedest Things: But Really They Do

Remember how just last week I posted a graphic about the number of under-18 year olds killed by under-18 year olds? Well now we have an 18-year-old shooting up an elementary school killing 19 students and two teachers. Legally the alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, is an adult given his age. But he was also a high-school student, reportedly more of a loner type. Legally an adult, perhaps, but I’d argue still more of a child. At least a young adult.

Well, as I noted above, here we are again, kids killing kids. With guns!

And it does look like it correlates with those state with more liberal gun laws, including Texas.

If you keep doing the same thing, but expect different results…

Credit for the piece is mine.

The Shrinking Colorado River

Last week the Washington Post published a nice long-form article about the troubles facing the Colorado River in the American and Mexican west. The Colorado is the river dammed by the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams. It’s what flows through the Grand Canyon and provides water to the thirsty residents of the desert southwest.

But the river no longer reaches the ocean at the Gulf of California.

Why? Part drought, part population growth, and part economic activity. The article does a great job of exploring the issue and it does so through the occasional use of information graphics. This screenshot captures the storage capacity of the two main dams, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, created by the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, respectively. You may have heard of these recently because the water shortages presently affecting the region have brought reservoir levels to some of their lowest levels in years. And that means people have been finding all sorts of things.

But the graphic does a nice job of showing just how low things have gotten of late. Naturally I am curious what the data looks like on a longer timeline. Hoover Dam, of course, began during the administration of Herbert Hoover but was completed during the Franklin Roosevelt administration—who also renamed the dam as Boulder Dam though Congress reversed that change in 1947. Lake Powell came along three decades later and so the timelines would not be the exact same, but I am curious all the same.

The overall article makes sparse use of the graphics and they occupy much less space in the design than the numerous accompanying photographs. But the balance in terms of content works, I just would have preferred the charts and maps a bit larger.

Contrast this to what we explored last week in a New York Times piece, specifically the online version. There we saw graphics with no headers, data descriptors, axes labels, &c. Here we see the Washington Post was able to create a captivating piece but treat the data and information—and the reader—with respect. There are fewer graphics in this piece, but the way they were handled puts this leaps and bounds above the online version we looked at last week.

Credit for the piece goes to a lot of people, but the graphics specifically to John Muyskens. The rest of the credits go to the author Karin Brulliard and then just copying and pasting from the page: Editing by Amanda Erickson and Olivier Laurent. Photography by Matt McClain. Video by Erin Patrick O’Connor and Jesús Salazar. Video editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Zoeann Murphy. Graphics by John Muyskens. Graphics editing by Monica Ulmanu. Design and development by Leo Dominguez. Design editing by Matthew Callahan and Joe Moore. Copy editing by Susan Stanford. Additional editing by Ann Gerhart.

Whilst We Wait for Roe…

to be overturned by the Supreme Court, as seems likely, states have been busy passing laws to both restrict and expand abortion access. This article from FiveThirtyEight describes the statutory activity with the use of a small multiple graphic I’ve screenshot below.

Each little map represents an action that states could have taken recently, for example in the first we have states banning abortion before 13 weeks, i.e. a nearly total ban on abortion. It uses dots, for this map orange, to indicate legislative acts to that effect. But if states have passed multiple legislative acts, e.g. South Dakota when it comes to banning specific types or reasons for abortion, multiple dots are used.

I generally like this, but would have liked to have seen an overview map either at the beginning or end that would put all the states together in context. Dot placement, especially for states like Kentucky, would be tricky, but it would go a way to show how complex and convoluted the issue has become at the state level.

Credit for the piece goes to Ryan Best.