Virostatiq

This is just a short recap of the project that was awarded a Miguel Urabayen Award as the Best Map in printed media and a gold medal for a feature article at Malofiej24. The whole list of awarded projects is available on their website, our project is listed first, and then again under the Features / Reportajes heading. My colleagues – Aljaž Vesel, Ajda Bevc, Aljaž Vindiš and the graphics editor Samo Ačko – got two more awards, and I congratulate them sincerely. Read more about the award here. The article in dnevnik.si about the awards is here (Slovenian).

The project was my first collaboration with the Dnevnik newspaper for the Objektivno feature section, which mainly features various data visualizations. It was a done in a  somewhat ad-hoc fashion for lack of anything else to do. I realized I’ve been scraping the site where the list of towed cars is published for the owners to check if the car suddenly disappears from a public parking in Ljubljana.  The list doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to be on this page. It contained the car make and model, registration plate number, the location from where it was towed, and datetime stamp. We decided to put it all on the map, and analyze it a bit to see where the luxury makes are towed most.

Here’s the map printout from the newspaper. Click it for the PDF, or click this link.

It’s in Slovenian language, so for English speakers:

• street segment thickness is for number of cars towed (legend top left)
• color is for ratio between better and ordinary car makes – we arbitrarily decided what is “better”, but we generally considered more expensive cars, like Audi, Mercedes-Benz, etc. as better. Yellow is for uniform distribution, red is for slightly more better cars, blue for mostly better cars, and black for exclusively better cars. Circles denote regions where mostly better cars were towed. That usually happens in the center and around the new sports stadium.
• on the bottom left there are some statistics, as well as the list of car makes we used.
• on the bottom right there are some map cutouts of neuralgic points on the map with some commentary.

One wonders if owners of better cars are more prone to get parking tickets than owners of ordinary cars. I believe that is so, and the sad reason must be an inflated sense of self-importance, which translates in the said persons being convinced that the law doesn’t apply to them, leaving their shiny cars parked in inappropriate places. There’s another side to the story – the underpaid traffic wardens, who are all too happy to make a point by immediately calling the tow truck and ignoring the owners’ pleas even if they come before the towing itself. So there is a social undertone to this project, and I’m happy if the jury members realized this as they deliberated.

The whole project was done on Mapbox platform, except for street geocoding and geometry, which comes from my privately curated database, derived from public dataset, which is in turn managed by this public agency. Many thanks to Mapbox team for the turf.js library, which I used in node.js to properly annotate the geometry with numbers and calculate the ratios. The resulting geojson file was then imported into MapBox Studio, styled by the gifted designer Aljaž Vindiš, and prepared for print.

Some time ago, I released a much more comprehensive project with many visualizations of traffic infractions in Slovenia, which took me months to make, but failed to make any significant traffic or impact in public sphere.

The raw development version is still on my server, see it here. I forgot what I meant with the coloring, but I guess it’s the car make ratio.

The whole thing took us around two days to make. After that, we collaborated on a number of interesting projects, but sadly, as is inevitable in life, the merry group self-disbanded and left the newspaper for greener pastures. I’m looking forward to collaborating again with any of them.

Image courtesy of Matjaž Erker.