In mid March 2020, Nebraska state officials began pandemic restrictions designed to slow the spread of COVID-19. This project looks at a specific dataset from the state Department of Transportation that looks at 61 automated traffic counting stations statewide. The stations count traffic, day in and day out, and the state provides the data as a PDF.
The JOUR307 class at UNL's College of Journalism and Mass Communication took that PDF, parsed it into machine readable data, then matched the data to GIS locations of the automated counting stations.
Using R, we analyzed the data using simple percent change from February to March. We did have March 2019 to March 2020 data but did not use it because of widescale flooding in the state in March 2019. We also visualized the data.
Then, each student signed up for three traffic counting stations and called nearby businesses. They asked them, basically, what they're seeing on the road nearby.
We then crafted stories for each county that we had data for, with unique leads and a common set of data paragraphs. News organizations around the state were then invited to publish the stories.
