Using Color to Reveal More Insights #TweakThursday 42

Coloring does make a difference, big or small depending on cases.

I noticed Yang Yu of Shanghai made a great viz and won Viz of the Day a couple of days ago. It required a lot of work to get the data set pulled from Open Street Map. It looks like this:

This is the Tableau rendition of Geoff Boeing's original research
https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orientation/

I found it a bit monotonic. So I decided to add color to it. Then, I found that among the 4 quadrants, the other 3 are almost the rotated replica of the first one. Thus we just need to color the first quadrant. There are 9 equal-size slices per quadrant, one per 10 degree. So we only need a palette of 9 colors for the coloring. In my design, I assigned 9 colors in a color spectrum sequential order.

Here is the result:

Besides being very colorful, the most revealing thing is, I see cities having the same street orientations. Two big cities in Australia, both Melbourne and Sidney have the similar street orientation. Is this a miracle, or they have the same urban planner? Manhattan is alone in its street orientations which is unusual.

Other insights include that most US cities are well urban planned.

Color does help a lot in identifying patterns of similar orientations.

Feel free to download my workbook.