Dashboard Day 3- Use Of The Road Network in North East England

by Conrad Wilson

The Brief

We were tasked with downloading and visualising data regarding the traffic data from dft.gov.uk. I looked specifically at the North East of England. We learnt yesterday that when Andy says “Easy Enough?” never say yes. He just makes it harder… Yesterday we had to use Tableau 9 and today we had to use Tableau 8.

Getting The Data

Within dft.gov.uk each local authority had csv files containing their traffic data embedded within the web page. I used alteryx to generate the urls of each local authorities csv files and download them, see Figure 1 and save the files to my computer. I will write a different blog post on how this was achieved.

Figure 1. Downloading All csv files from dtf.gov

From here I wildcard inputted each file into a new workflow, Figure 2. I then cleaned up the data. The data came with Eastings and Northings spatial information. I converted these to latitude and longitude and then removed the spatial objects as Tableau 8 cannot handle spatial objects. The next part of the workflow was to determine the general direction of the road, up and down or left and right, to allow the roads to be plotted in Tableau using a line chart.

Figure 2. Workflow to clean up data

This data was then outputted and visualised in Tableau 8. There are many limitations of Tableau 8, particularly when you compare it to Tableau 2018! This led to some issues with formatting and made the process take far longer. I decided to look at what the most used routes in the north east were for each type of transport. Eventually I produced the following dashboard, Figure 3. It shows the most used routes as well as how the use of transport types has changed over time.

Figure 3. Final Dashboard.