Traffic Camera Tickets
Illustrations for a story highlighting the racial disparities in tickets from automated traffic cameras in Chicago. Includes lead animation and a series of illustrations providing a guide to road infrastructure and its effects on driving speeds. Art direction by Andrea Wise and Lisa Larson-Walker.
The way a road is designed can influence how people will drive on it, including how fast they will go. A four-lane road like this one allows higher traffic volumes and speeds.
That’s different from a two-lane road like this one, where a tighter street will cause the driver to slow down.
The population density matters, too. Roads in less dense neighborhoods, or along industrial areas, have fewer pedestrians and less traffic, which encourages speeding.
More residential density often means more pedestrian and vehicle traffic, which discourages speeding.
On some wide, multilane stretches of road, drivers encounter fewer “calming measures,” such as pedestrian islands or concrete medians.
On the other hand, roads that include pedestrian islands, concrete medians, marked crosswalks and bicycle infrastructure force drivers to slow down.