In March our government introduced measures to slow down the spread of COVID-19. As expected, this resulted in a decrease in traffic on highways. But, what does this look like? We compared 3 Tuesdays; before, during, and after the rules were loosened.

To create this visualization, our Data Visualization Lab took a deep-dive into the open data of the National Data Warehouse for Traffic Information (NDW).

With this visualization, we aim to give you a clear idea what the impact is on traffic flows on the highways in the Netherlands:

Visualizing traffic intensity in the Netherlands for 3 Tuesdays: one before, during, and after intelligent lockdown measures were loosened.

Bekijk deze video extern op: Vimeo

Here, each ball represents a sensor, and the color indicates how many cars per hour have passed these sensors on the highway. Dark blue indicates low traffic intensity, whereas yellow means the roads are busy. Because there are many sensors close to each other, and having all those dots together, the visualization resembles a caterpillar.”

Erik Boertjes

Data Visualization Engineer

Downloads