Painting Attention: How Asphalt Art Makes Roads Safer by Connor Rothschild

This is a visual essay about the impacts of asphalt art on roadway safety. It visualizes data from Bloomberg Philanthropies and showcases how intersections across the United States enjoy greater safety profiles after art installation.

Alongside scroll-linked visuals and charts, the piece features a visual style echoing the subject matter, and charts positioned on top of images for context. The essay starts with an examination of one intersection and zooms out to allow for user exploration in a map-centric dashboard at the end of the piece.

Our central design focus was to cohesively show “before” and “after” in terms of imagery and effects. We leveraged tools like the scratch-off effect to allow visitors to show before and after imagery via user interaction. We also opted for simpler charts, like slope charts with a few lines, so that the effects of art installation were clear.