Plotly is great for generating beautiful visuals, and lately I’ve been experimenting with a very capable possibility within plotly: animated geographical data.
There are great articles out there showing you how to plot geographical data over time, such as this one, by Shinichi Okada, or this one, by Maeliza S. However, one thing is common among these articles: they make use of plotly’s built-in geographical data for plotting the geometries, which makes them limited to locations such as USA states and the world map, including others that can be found here.
For our case, we have a dataset showing the behaviour of snow plowing across the neighbourhoods of the city of Toronto. Well, if the city of Toronto is not included on Plotly’s built-in maps, how do we do? We use our own geometry!