Roads to Rome

At least for Europe it is obvious: all roads lead to Rome! You can reach the eternal city on almost 500,000 routes from all across the continent. Which road would you take?

To approach one of the biggest unsolved quests of mobility, the first question we asked ourselves was: where do you start from, when you want to know every road to Rome? We aligned starting points in a 26,503,452 km² grid covering all of Europe. Every cell of this grid contains a starting point to one of our journeys to Rome.

Now that we had our 486,713 starting points we needed to find out how we could reach Rome. For this we created an algorithm that calculated one route for every trip. The more often a specific single street segment was used, the stronger it is displayed on the map. The maps as an outcome of this project are somewhere between information visualization and data art, unveiling mobility on a very large scale.

Ali Kaya

Author

Ali Kaya

This is Ali. Bespectacled and mustachioed father, math blogger, and soccer player. I also do consult for global math and science startups.