How visual analytics unlock insights into traffic incidents in urban areas

Abstract

Nowadays, the way people observe mobility in their cities is significantly changing by the prevalence, accessibility, and abundance of large volume of traffic data. However, capturing perceptions from large and heterogeneous traffic datasets and providing them to people is a challenging task. A better understanding of how rhetorical design choices shape users’ experience of traffic visualizations should help make interactive data visualizations more engaging and useful to audiences as they use data-driven analytics to make decisions in traffic contexts. In this paper, different visualization techniques for traffic data are explored and an investigation of what insights each visualization will yield is carried out using the traffic incidents in the city of Riyadh for the 2013 to 2015 timeframe.