Traffic Speeds by Zipcode

Dec 15, 2014

Finding a dataset of traffic speeds by zip code is a surprisingly hard thing to do. When I was working at the Census RDC at UCLA, I had plenty of time to spare while waiting out time on the cluster so I created my own. Time + many asynchronous requests + many rotating proxy servers.

The map below shows average travel speeds from all 32,000+ zip code tabulation areas. The average travel speed was calculated as the mean speed from trips to the nearest neighbors. All up, this used data from slightly less than 5 million trips.

I found nearest neighbors via grouping zip codes by geohash. Look up geohashing if this is unfamiliar, it'll save you from many Haversine calculations.

(The interactive map was hosted on Google Fusion Tables, which Google shut down in 2019.)