Does the US highway system have high cholesterol?

Similar to how veins and arteries pump blood to and from our hearts, our infrastructure moves people and materials around the country. In this video, Metrocosm’s Max Galka took 24 hours’ worth of highway traffic and visualized it to look like the human circulatory system.

Max made the visual using the raw data that the US Department of Transportation used for its July summary of traffic volume trends across the country (it puts one out each month). Here, you’re seeing traffic volume counts for every hour of every day at about 4,000 traffic counting stations nationwide, which adds up to about 14 million datapoints in all.

Max noted the following when we emailed about his map:

For the most part, the traffic is concentrated just where you would expect, in the most populous areas: New York, LA, Chicago, Florida, Texas. But if you look at the map, you will notice that there is one spot where many of the major routes converge, which I was surprised to discover is Nashville.

I was also surprised by the pattern of traffic across the day. Rather than spiking at rush hour in the morning and again in the evening, the volume of traffic on the interstate grows steadily throughout the day, peaking at 4pm and falling off from there.

What do you notice when you watch?