Animation: Mapping Chicago snow plows during the blizzard

The recent Sun-Times article about how Chicago snow plows cleared 14th Ward Alderman Ed Burke’s street five times during the recent blizzard while his neighbors waited for plow service was based on the city’s Plow Tracker data obtained and parsed by the team at clearstreets.org.

Now the team has transformed the data into a visualization using a recently developed tool from mapping service CartoDB. To create the visual, ClearStreets.org “scraped” data on where the city’s 300 plows were located over the duration of the snowstorm from about 7 pm Feb. 1 to 10 pm Feb. 2. The locations were then colorized and sped up to create a heatmap that plays back the paths that plows took over that time period. The result is a vibrant animation showing snow plow activity during and after some of the heaviest snowfall:

Get the data used to create the animation here.

And here is a link to a full screen version.