These amazing moving maps show how far Americans travel to get to work

Mark Evans

37 percent of Americans may get to work from home occasionally, but the rest of us spend time commuting to and from the office every day.

Although we may experience rush-hour crowds, it's hard to imagine what commutes look like on a city-wide scale. But that's what Mark Evans, a web developer with an interest in data analysis and visualization, wants to show us.

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He's put together an animated map showing where people live and work throughout the US. Users can select specific states and counties and watch animations of commutes, toggling back and forth see where workers are coming from and where residents are traveling. 

Evans explains how he created the map in a blog post. The data he uses comes from the American Community Survey, an ongoing survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, which is available to the public. Evans analyzed 4.1 million rows of data about Americans' commutes from the ACS' massive spreadsheet, and used Google Maps' application programming interface to plot them for his animations.

The result is a looping cluster of dots, representing scores of people moving back and forth between their jobs and homes. The origins and  destinations are color coded, and bigger dots indicate a higher density of people coming from or going to a given place.

You can search for your own city on Evans' website, or scroll down to watch GIFs of the dots moving hypnotically back and forth across ten US cities.