Understand the impact of your transportation tax dollars by mashing up commute times and congestion relief spending
Everyone hates traffic, and for most of us, it seems to be getting worse with every passing year. But how does traffic congestion in our home town actually compare to other cities across the country, and what is the government doing about it? These are complicated questions, but we can begin to answer them by comparing data on commuting times with data on public spending on congestion relief projects. The resulting mashup can enable us to see the extent to which government spending through formula grants and related programs from the Department of Transportation aligns with high-congestion regions. Data on commute times is collected by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey each year, and we’ll access these data via DataUSA’s convenient API. Spending data is provided by the Treasury Department on USASpending.gov. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a simple web visualization which mashes up these two datasets and allows users to start to get answers to questions about congestion mitigation spending.
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