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Robert Kosara / February 8, 2007

What Travelling Presidential Candidates Save

ZIPScribbleMap vs. TPCMap

An anonymous commenter asked what the savings were of the Travelling Presidential Candidate Map (ZIPTPCMap) vs. the ZIPScribbleMap. That was not something I had even thought about, and so the result was quite surprising.

The total travel distance on the ZIPScribbleMap is 1,859,224.14km (1,155,268.3mi), while the path through the ZIPTPCMap is only 408,589.32km (253,885.63mi) long. That is a factor of almost 4.6, which is rather significant. The method used to calculate the TPC path is only about 75% optimal, so that if done properly, the factor could be well above 5.

What this shows is that it clearly pays off to follow a presidential candidate around, rather than just blindly following the ZIP code order without thinking.

Filed Under: Blog 2007

Robert Kosara is Data Visualization Developer at Observable. Before that, he was Research Scientist at Tableau Software (2012–2022) and Associate Professor of Computer Science (2005–2012). His research focus is the communication of data using visualization. In addition to blogging, Robert also runs and tweets. Read More…

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