Alternative map visualization

[HotGarbo]

Fantastic work bringing awareness to the tragic consequences of American car culture.

I was interested in seeing the data across the entire country, so I made a proof-of-concept in an attempt to tackle the challenges of how to display and serve the that data efficiently and cheaply: https://hotgarbo.github.io/nhtsa-fars/

With MapLibre GL JS and Protomaps PMTiles one can render hundreds of thousands of points while serving the data from static files.

I used Tippecanoe to generate PMTiles for each year with the bare-minimum of columns to display a popup. Combining all the years into a single layer is an option, but the file was too large to host on GitHub pages. Also, separate files makes it easier to stop loading years irrelevant to a query (had I implemented a time range selector).

There's room for improvement, for sure. Each of the lower zoom levels loads about 10 MB of data which is still a lot, but I didn't want to hide any events at any zoom level.

The code is readily available for use should you feel inspired: https://github.com/HotGarbo/nhtsa-fars/

[bencarneiro]

@HotGarbo Get on my calendar! I would really love to chat.

https://calendly.com/bencarneiro

I am a waiter. We are going to change the world!

[bencarneiro]

This is going to be the main map now

[bencarneiro]

I will implement this week

[bencarneiro]

This is the map now. Everybody give hotgarbo a round of applause