Category Archives: Data Graphics

Tube Colours

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Transport for London (TfL) take their colours extremely seriously – the London Underground, in particularly, uses colour extensively to brand each line, and the maps and liveries are very well known.

The organisation has a colour guide to ensure that, when referencing the tube lines, the correct colour is used. Somewhat surprisingly, the guide includes hexadecimal (i.e. web) colours for only a “safe” palette – i.e. colours which would definitely work in very old web browsers. They don’t list the “true” hexadecimal for the colours, even though, confusingly, the colour shown is the true one. I couldn’t find anywhere on the web that did this either, all in one place, so here below is a summary. I’ve also included the safe colours so you can see the difference – but don’t use these unless you have to.

Line True Hexadecimal Web Safe Hexadecimal
Bakerloo #B36305 #996633
Central #E32017 #CC3333
Circle #FFD300 #FFCC00
District #00782A #006633
Hammersmith and City #F3A9BB #CC9999
Jubilee #A0A5A9 #868F98
Metropolitan #9B0056 #660066
Northern #000000 #000000
Piccadilly #003688 #000099
Victoria #0098D4 #0099CC
Waterloo and City #95CDBA #66CCCC
DLR #00A4A7 #009999
Overground #EE7C0E #FF6600
Tramlink #84B817 #66CC00

Bike Share Route Fluxes

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Capital Bikeshare, the bike sharing system for Washington DC and Arlington, recently released the data on their first 1.3 million journeys. Boston’s Hubway bike sharing system also released journey data for around 5000 journeys across an October weekend, as part of a visualisation competition. Both these data releases sit alongside London’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, which also released data on around 3.2 million journeys made during the first part of last year.

Taking together all these data sets, I’ve used Routino and OpenStreetMap data to suggest likely routes taken for each recorded journey. This same set of data was used for Martin Zaltz Austwick’s excellent animation of bikes going around London streets. I’ve then built another set of data, an node/edge list, showing how many bike sharing bikes have probably travelled along each section of road. Finally, I’ve used node/edge visualiser Gephi and its Geo Layout plugin to visualise the sets of edges. The resulting maps here are presented below without embellishment, contextual information, scale or legend (for which I apologise – unfortunately this isn’t my current primary work focus so my time on it is restricted.)

For the two American schemes featured here, I have set the Routino profiler to not use trunk roads. Unlike most UK trunk roads, American trunk roads (“freeways”?) appear to be almost as big as our motorways, and I expect you wouldn’t find bikes on them. Unfortunately there are some gaps in the Washington DC data, which does show some cycle-lane bridges alongside such freeways, but these aren’t always connected to roads at either end or to other parts of the cycle network, so my router doesn’t discover them. This means that only a few crossings between Virginia and Washington DC are shown, whereas actually more direct ones are likely to be also in use. The profile also over-rewards cycleways – yes these are popular but probably not quite as popular as the distinctive one in the centre of Washington DC (15th Street North West) showing up as a very fat red line, suggests. The highlighting of other errors in the comments on this post is welcomed, I may optimise the profiler (or even edit OpenStreetMap a bit, if appropriate) and have another shot.

London:

Washington DC:

Boston:

A Glimpse of Bike Share Geographies Around the World

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[Update - now including a much larger version.] Below is the image I submitted to this year’s UCL Research Images as Art exhibition. You can see it, and around 300 other entries, in the South Cloisters on the UCL campus in central London, for the next few days. A larger version can be viewed here. The image purposely has no explanatory text as it is intended as a piece of “infogeographic art” rather than as a map. It is derived from the dots for the various cities on my bike share map.

It shows the “footprint” of the docking stations making up 49 bike share systems around the world. The colours represent the empty/full state of each docking station at the particular moment in time when the image was made. The numbers show the total number of docking points – each docking station being made up of one or more docking points, each of which may or may not have a bike currently parked in it.

The geographies and topographies of the cities themselves inform the shape of the systems – particularly coastal cities (e.g. Nice, Rio, Barcelona, Miami Beach) and ones with large lakes mountains near their centres (e.g. Montreal).

A subtle but important point on the scaling: The scales of the systems (i.e. each system footprint and the spacing between docking stations) are roughly comparable – they actually vary by the cosine of the latitude – these means that the more tropical systems, e.g. Mexico City’s, appear to be up to ~20% smaller than they actually are, relative to the majority which are generally at temperate latitudes. However, the sizes of the circles themselves are directly comparable across all the systems, i.e each pixel on the graphic represents an equal number of docking points, regardless of which system it is in.

Don’t Zone-1 It When You Can Boris Bike It

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[Updated with new connections.] Ever thought what the tube network would look like if you took out the expensive Zone 1? Me neither, until this morning, when I was wondering if it was possible to utilise my current “Boris Bike” bikeshare 24-hour membership to save a bit of money on commuting in to work.

Transport for London would really rather you didn’t take the tube into Zone 1. It’s often at capacity during the rush hour. The fares are priced accordingly – for example, to get a tube from Zone 3 to Zone 1, it costs £2.90 during the Peak Fare periods, compared with £1.40 if you only go from Zone 3 to Zone 2. Do that commute twice, and it’s a £3 saving missing out Zone 1, which more than makes up for the £1 Boris Bike 24-hour membership charge. So, I was wondering if it is viable to get off the tube a few stops early and Boris Bike the final mile or so.

Superimposing my London bike share map reveals directions from where such money-saving journeys may be possible. Plenty of opportunities from the north-west or the west, with St John’s Wood, Notting Hill and Earls Court having easy Boris Bike accessibility. Access from the south-west and south is also good, thanks to Vauxhall and Elephant & Castle. Things get a little trickier – as usual – in the south-east, where a 1km walk from Bermondsey, or a much longer walk from South Bermondsey are your only options – the region won’t even stand to benefit from the forthcoming scheme expansion. The east is also an option, with Whitechapel being very well stocked with Boris Bikes, and Wapping not being too far either. The east is set to benefit too from the imminent expansion of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, to use its full name, to cover all of Tower Hamlets. The north-east is OK, with Hoxton an option, although it’s a shame the docks don’t extend up to Highbury & Islington station, a major interchange. The north is also good, thanks to the legendary Mornington Crescent station.

Four of the Best Zone 2 & Bike Opportunities

  • Mornington Crescent (Northern Line) – right beside a big docking station. Don’t go to Euston (Zone 1). It’s also easy to get to Mornington Crescent from the Overground, thanks to an unmarked but official Out of Station Interchange.
  • Notting Hill Gate (Central Line) – the tube takes you to the top of the hill, then go east by Boris Bike.
  • Earl’s Court (District/Piccadilly) – it’s a long way to Charing Cross, but if you don’t need to go that far, the bike is a good way to travel.
  • Whitechapel (District/Hammersmith & City) – two big stands very close to the station, and an easy cycle along CS2 into the City.

So, all in all, not too bad. Whether it’s worth the extra time walking to a convenient docking station, and the worry of finding it all out of bikes, to save a pound or two, is another thing…

+ =

See my Mapping London article for more detail about the No Zone 1 map. You can click on the map above for a larger version. An SVG version (i.e. editable) without the bike docking stations, is downloadable here although there is lots of missing detail beyond Zone 2.

The map was based on a Wikimedia/Wikipedia file, which I then augmented (to show the Overground and some selected regular railway lines) with OpenStreetMap data, by producing a map in GEMMA of railway=rail features. I also added some unmarked Out of Station Interchanges, thanks to this FOI request. Photos by Gnatallica, Clotheyes and Wwarby on Flickr.

[Update: An earlier version of the article and map made reference to Shoreditch High Street station which I incorrectly thought was in Zone 2 for "old East London Line" journeys - it appears this is not actually the case - the anomaly that I was misremembering is that for short journeys from the station, the Peak Fare increases do not apply. I've also updated the map a few times since posting this article, to add in a few missing stations and also the locations of the big terminus stations in London. I've also added some "Out of Station Interchanges" on the Overground - many of these aren't marked on official TfL maps, but are valid interchanges, i.e. you don't get charged for two journeys.]

Main Street UK

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GEMMA is the project I’ve been working on for the last six months, it’s one of the JISCgeo projects and it is now released – although consider it to be beta as there are lots of bugs and UI quirks that we are aware of. More about GEMMA can be found on the project’s blog.

One use of the OpenStreetMap feature highlighter in GEMMA, that was suggested by one of the participants at the JISCgeo Meeting earlier this week where we launched the web application, and augmented by a friend who was trying it out, was mapping the occurrences of the “High Street” road name – and a few regional variations, namely Main Street, Front Street, Market Street, Fore Street and The Street. Using GEMMA, and the high level of completion of OpenStreetMap in the UK and Ireland, allows us to visually show the spatial patterns of such street names.

Here’s a stitched-together screenshot of the GEMMA webpage showing the pattern throughout the UK and part of Ireland:

It turns out that Main Street is popular in the Midlands and in Scotland and Ireland, and Front Street is popular in the North-East of England (around Newcastle) while High Street is used nearly everywhere in the UK – but only sparingly in Ireland. Market Street is popular in the Manchester and Devon areas. Fore Street is popular in Cornwall and The Street very popular in Essex and Kent.

Note that many parts of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, are not yet well mapped in OpenStreetMap, so the street names will be missing in some parts here. The base-map is copyright Google and the street data is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap.

You can see the live version of the map here.

The Relative Urban Footprint of Tokyo and London

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I was intrigued by this tweet that appeared in my Twitter client this morning:

It’s one of those tweets that makes you go “That doesn’t sound right?”

Is Tokyo really a third of the size of England? It generally takes just under four hours by highish-speed train from London to the edge of England (Berwick) and a similar amount of time to get down to Cornwall. Even Wales is a good couple of hours away. I know they have ultra-fast trains in Japan but can Tokyo really be that big?

The link offers up the following map as proof, which appears to be based on Google Earth (very likely Copyright Google and its aerial imagery partners):

Some of the comments on the source article mention the key point that the Toyko metropolitan area, an administrative area, contains a large amount of rural land. The same is somewhat true of London – parts of the south-eastern fringe of the Greater London Authority (GLA) area are very definitely rural, and conversely built-up areas (Loughton) are outside of the GLA but part of the London continuous urban area and very much feel part of London – e.g. it’s on the tube network and in Zone 6.

Another example of administrative areas not coinciding with urban areas is that the City of Edinburgh council area extends well away from the city – but only to the west (i.e. to the Forth Bridge). In all other directions, the boundary is not far from the city bypass which is itself not far from the urban area, or there’s water in the way.

So a better comparison would be to visually compare the built-up areas of the two cities, first of all making sure that the scales are exactly the same and that the projections are appropriate for each city – I’m not saying this is not the case for the Google Earth example, although you do have to be careful with how Google Earth displays scales for, and projects, very large areas, as they are not always 100% rigorous.

I asked James of Spatial Analysis to have a quick look, as he had the data to hand, and he’s produced the rather lovely map which is at the top of this article. Thanks James! The dark grey areas are built-up areas and railways and the land and sea are also shown for context. A rough visual comparison of the map shows the urban area of Tokyo is maybe 3 times the size of London. This kind of equates to the population difference (8.5 million vs 31 million, using very rough numbers) and shows that Tokyo would fit quite snugly into Kent, rather than taking up much of southern England as the original statement implied – its own map, while exaggerating the urban area, also doesn’t quite cover a third of the nation.

(As an aside – it’s tricky to define exactly what a metropolitan area is – Wikipedia’s article for instance has very different numbers.)

So Tokyo is big – yes – but not nation-eating gigantic. I could probably just about cope with it.

Human Visualisation

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One thing I noticed in Vienna, and passing through Brussels airport on the way home, was a number of “augmented reality” advertising displays, ones that detect people in front of them and then show that on their screens. In all the following, Steve Gray of CASA was the subject being visualised.

Here was the first I saw, at Wien Mitte S-Bahn station, where a special “performance” box was taped out on the platform alongside:

Then, at Vienna Aiport, they had a screen above part of a walkway, which augmented various “forest” animals with passersby. Rabbits and deer would appear, grazing on the “grass” when no one was passing. As people approached, the animals would disappear back into the undergrowth. Passing people on the screen left virtual “leaf trails”, while butterflies would occassionally land on their shoulders. Unfortunately my camera didn’t take a great picture, although you can see a butterfly on someone’s hair and some leaf trails here:

On changing through Brussels, a “heat scanner” showed passing people. This was beside a travelator, so your moment of fame was brief:

Vienna itself currently has a aural art installation from the Royal College of Arts. On walking through the Meccano-like sculpture, detectors would sense you and a nearby speaker would start playing a musical sound. Each detector had a different sound type, but they worked in harmony to produce a kind of song, changing as you and other people moved around:

Sadly, on our arrival into Heathrow, we were back to the regular non-augmented ad experience.

Sense and the City

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The Sense and the City exhibition at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden opens today, and runs until March next year. It includes a number of transport visualisations contributed by the team at UCL CASA, including a themed version of my own Bike Share Map, and a similar animation I’ve done for Oyster card tap ins/outs, and also Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick’s bike movement animation. I was along with Martin (pictured above and below!) and some of the others in the team, for the private view on Wednesday.

The exhibition is in three main sections – downstairs there are a number of big screens, showing the aforementioned animations. The area is quite dark, so the graphics have come out really well. The second section is up a spiral staircase (easy to miss) where a number of touch-screen computers show more visualisations from CASA and others, each selectable by the user. The system that runs this will allow us to update the animations during the course of the exhibition, so if we do some newer related work, you may well see it here! Behind this is the last section, which is more conceptual, with a number of “visions of the future from the past” magazine covers, and other bits of futuristic transport technology – a Sinclair C5 and a “Ryno” one-wheeled motorbike. Sadly a Barclays Cycle Hire bike is not there in the flesh, but you don’t have to walk far from Covent Garden to run into them in real life. Finally, just outside the exhibition area is a “smart” bus-stop. You have to look carefully to spot the video camera, which apparently detects how much interest people are taking in the advertising panel, and adjusts its advertising appropriately.

Of course, being the transport museum, all the regular tube trains and buses are still there. The “New Bus for London” mockup is there, as is a classic Routemaster, and it would have been rude not to have gone for a ride…

Below – the Oyster card animation and Steven Gray’s Tweet-o-Meters.

CASA on TV

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Pleased that a feature on spatial data visualisation at UCL CASA has appeared as a video on the BBC News website today. It includes some work I did with Martin Austwick on animating the bike share in London – I did the routing, he did the amazing animation in Processing. It also includes visualisation of bus journeys, Oyster card taps and tweet stats for cities around the world.

A Historical Comparison of OpenStreetMap’s Completeness in Britain

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Dr Muki Haklay,UCL CEGE, has been carrying out some quantitative research into OpenStreetMap’s coverage in the UK, comparing road lengths in each square kilometre, with those in a definitive national dataset, Ordnance Survey Meridian 2. He’s updated his findings every few months, from March 2008 until March this year. Some interesting research findings have been found, such as a potential correlation between an area’s affluence and the map’s completeness, a possible reflection of a contributor demographic. On his suggestion I’ve taken his dataset and overlaid the red/blue under/overcompleteness maps on OpenStreetMap (or Ordnance Survey StreetView) itself, allowing the specific towns and villages that are missing the OSM love, to be identified.

The mashup can be viewed here.

These days, OpenStreetMap’s coverage is pretty good -often exceeding Meridian’s, as service roads, private roads and alleys, that don’t exist on Meridian 2 are added in. There’s still (as of March 2011) some significant holes though, particularly in parts of Wales, the North East and East Anglia.

Note the first four maps only cover England. There is an interesting artefact in the first one – a square around London can clearly be seen, corresponding to the extent of aerial imagery, in that area, that was available via a special agreement with Yahoo for tracing. Outside of that area, only 50-year-old (out of copyright) maps and contributor GPS traces were available. Since May last year, the Ordnance Survey OpenData release, and Microsoft Bing Aerial imagery, which became available at roughly the same time, has significantly accelerated work on the map. I presented on the diverse sources of data at the Society of Cartographers annual conference last year, you can see the slides here.

ITO World’s OS Locator is just one of a number of tools that the OpenStreetMap contributor community in the UK is using to “complete” the map, moving towards the goal of a comprehensive free database of the UK’s (and world’s) streets.