10 · New York in Time-Lapse
Replay a day of real travel times on New York’s roads, and find what caused the jams
Every coloured line is a stretch of road where readers at both ends spot the same E-ZPass tags, so the system knows how long cars take to drive it. Green means close to the speed limit; red means crawling. Press Play to watch the day go by, five minutes at a time.
Which roads turn red first in the morning: the ones heading into Manhattan, or the ones heading out? And when the evening comes, does the jam simply run in reverse?
Click a road to see its speed through the day.
Data: TRANSCOM (TRANSMIT travel times and event feed). Each road link is drawn along the road it covers, matched to OpenStreetMap roads, and shifted slightly to the right of the direction of travel. Base map and road shapes © OpenStreetMap contributors.
What to look for
- Rush hours. When does the first road turn red, and where? Does the evening look like the morning in reverse?
- Incidents. Find a red stretch in the middle of the day. Is there an incident marker just downstream of it? Click it.
- Bottlenecks. Some roads turn red at the same place every weekday. Pick another day: is the jam in the same place, at the same time? That is a bottleneck (Lecture 6), not an accident.
- Streets versus highways. The Midtown street grid has a limit of 48 km/h (30 mph). How close do its streets get?