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Bike Share Data Graphics London Mashups OpenLayers

The First Million London Bike Share Journeys

Thanks to a FOI request from Adrian Short, Transport for London have recently released to their developers area details of 1.4 million bike share journeys. The data is believed to include all the journeys between 30 July 2010 and 3 November 2010, except those starting between midnight and 6am.

I’ve created a map which visualises these journeys – select a docking station and a time, and it will show the journeys that start/end at that dock, depending on the options chosen.

You can see the map here. On launching the site, an initial docking station – one outside Waterloo station – is selected, and an “interesting” timeframe is chosen – the morning of 4 October, which was a day impacted by a tube strike.

Heavy usage along the Broad Walk through Kensington Gardens, particularly at weekends:

The predominant flows from a docking station near King’s Cross station, in weekday mornings, are outwards (red lines), particularly south towards the river. Only a few inbound journeys happen (blue lines):

The reverse is true in weekday evenings, as commuters head back to the stations:

The map bears a resemblance to my live Barclays Cycle Hire scheme status map, as I’m reusing a lot of the same code and graphics.

13 replies on “The First Million London Bike Share Journeys”

Hi Ben

The map was put together using vector layers in OpenLayers – i.e. OpenLayers.Layer.Vector, using OpenLayers’ rule-based styling. The background is a custom OpenStreetMap render but really any background tiles could be used, e.g. Google Maps.

[…] Gilles posait la question dans ce billet d'un fossé culturel en matière d'infographie qui passerait au milieu de l'Atlantique, voire sous la Manche. Il ne croit pas si bien dire. Le Web américain fourmille de cartes géolocalisant tout et n'importe quoi — les panneaux solaires à San Francisco, les sitcoms à New-York, les places de parking disponibles dans la rue à Boston, les importations américaines de pétrole depuis 1973 ou encore le long voyage de Barack Obama jusque la Maison Blanche. Londres n'est pas en reste, avec par exemple sa très utile carte des métros en temps réel, sa carte des meutres en 2007 ou encore le mashup des trajets avec les vélos en libre service. […]

One interesting point to mention might be that northern dock of the Board Walk in Kensington Gardens is somewhat of a dead end.

I’m sure many people find, like I did, that all roads from that north point are either marked as ‘No Bicycles’ or it’s a main road with no cycle lanes. I’d imagine a lot of people would dock there for just that reason.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Boris bikes are fitted with GPS trackers so that the actual street journeys are recorded. The data would produce better graphics and could help the government to make journey routes safer. Of course, rider bike relationship should be anonymized.

Great map – tells a very clear story. Just one thing – red/green colour blindness is the most common form, so possibly the last two maps could be drawn using different colours?

congratulations on putting this together – its an amazing amount of analysis in a hugely user-friendly way!

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