For my first lab in GEOG 572, I was tasked with creating a scrollmap to tell a visual story, using Esri Storymaps. The story had to follow a three-act narrative, using visual storytelling tropes like a hook, climax, resolution, etc. Because I have always been intrigued by road design and efficiency, I decided to dive into the topic of roundabouts: a remarkable feat of traffic engineering that has exploded across the United States, but also attracted pessimism. To effectively tell a story, I wove together a narrative of growing traffic fatalities in the U.S., coupled with the increasing popularity of roundabouts. This involved deconstructing the data of traffic fatalities and explaining how roundabouts work. I then synthesized these data into a digestible map, and unpacked the resulting patterns between traffic fatalities and roundabout density. Check out my scrollmap on Storymaps or view it here: