The Future of Transport - Data Visualisation Dashboard (Transport for New South Wales, Australia) by Small Multiples

Everywhere around the world, governments face challenges planning infrastructure and transport. These challenges include growing and aging populations, safety and the environment. The Future Transport Regional Challenges project is an interactive dashboard with insightful animated visualisations for key issues in the state of New South Wales in Australia, which includes the city of Sydney. Each animation is specific for the selected region, providing meaningful observations from an otherwise inaccessible set of data.

The animated maps show population changes over time, increases in congestion, and where people travel: using flyovers, transitions, and narration to hone in on insights. Using video rather than an interactive tool allows the story to be told more directly and helps shareability on social media so audiences don't have to navigate a large website.

An interactive map of regions and key locations was also designed and developed to help audiences navigate the different regional dashboards. The map solved the issue of representing different sized regions, mixing it with point-based locations, and providing an accessible list view.

This project is particularly unique as the data visualisation videos were made using web technology software like Mapbox and JavaScript, rather than video production software. This approach allowed us to make quick updates to both data and content during the review process. Creating videos with web technology also created time and cost savings by allowing the same script to be applied to different regional videos by simply changing the underlying data and customising the annotations.