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Andrew Wolfe

The State of Our Roads and Bridges

Your state's roads and bridges — what's at risk

//awolfe76.github.io/the-state-of-our-roads-and-bridges/

Skills used: HTML, CSS, DataMaps (D3.js), Jekyll, Grunt.js


If Congress fails to reauthorize funding to repair our crumbling infrastructure by September 30, it will have very real consequences for all 50 states.

The White House recently released a PDF report detailing the requirements to begin to rebuild America’s infrastructure. Great, its definitely needed but the problem was this report (the web version) contained a visualization that was difficult, at best, to deciper and the data behind it was buried inside a PDF. This coming from the White House, who have been pushing the idea of Open Government and Open Data.

A friend of mine saw the report first and fired off an email to a few of us. Another friend quickly “liberated the data” from the PDF using Tabula and published it in a Google spreadsheet. I then converted that to json to use in, what I hope, is a better presentation of the problem … more of a story.

To build the front-end I used Jekyll and DataMaps. I also used Grunt for several tasks, including LiveReload to help make the site responsive using a mobile first approach.

The big take away from all of this is that to open the data (at least get it out of a PDF) in json format and build a decent front-end with visualizations didn’t take that long. This whole project was completed in under 2 days, probably around 6 - 10 working hours. There is just no reason not to do it.

More Work

The State of Our Roads and Bridges

Visualizing Mobile Broadband

Modernizing E-Rate 101

E-rate Maps of Fiber Connectivity to Schools and Libraries

Connect America Phase II – Initial Eligible Areas Map

AM Tower Locator

16th Annual Mobile Wireless Competition Report

Ambassador Program