Intra-City Traffic Data Visualization: A Systematic Literature Review

The increasing proportion of people living in urban areas causes well-known mobility issues such as pollution and congested roads. In addition to their heavy environmental impact, these issues negatively affect citizens' quality of life. Emerging technologies allow gathering huge amounts of data regarding traffic which can in turn be analyzed to diagnose mobility issues and propose solutions. Information visualization is increasingly leveraged as a medium to make the most out of this traffic data. In this paper, we present the systematic literature review we conducted to analyze the existing research in intra-city traffic data visualization. Following a well-defined and rigorous protocol, we have made a selection of 146 relevant works which we analyzed in depth under multiple perspectives: the data used, the domain problems, the visualization techniques and interaction, and the target end-user. We were able to identify common practices such as the most used visualization techniques and the problems tackled the most often. This allowed us to uncover little explored research directions and to suggest avenues for innovative research. In particular, we noted a lack of visualizations engaging citizens in the reflection on mobility-related issues and a lack of consideration for user studies.