I’ve made a couple of enhancements to my live London cycle hire map – you can now choose from several colour sets. A couple of the sets also change the circle sizes, so that these correspond to the number of bikes (or spaces) rather than the dock size. This means the circles grow or shrink as the bikes get used, rather than remaining static as before.
Using value-based colour ramps and/or circle size changes, rather than the standard hue-based colour ramp, are are a more “correct” way to show quantitative data graphics such as the hire map, as the data values aren’t distorted by “colour bias” (where a particular hue has more of an impact to the viewer).
I’ve also added a couple of panels to show how busy the hire scheme currently is, and how this compares to the same time 24 hours ago, and added a ticker which lists changes as they happen (e.g. docks becoming full or emptying quickly), in the style of the old BBC Grandstand vidi-printer.
Very few people have been using the bikes to commute home this evening (and yesterday evening) as it’s been raining a lot here in London! We have a weather station here at CASA, with historical data, so it should be possible to quantify the relationship between how hard it’s raining and what proportion of people decide to try another way to get home.
8 replies on “London Cycle Hire Vis – New Colours and Stats”
Hi James,
Thinking about time-of-day rather than relative time for the temporal axis, but it’s a bit harder to write the Google Chart API call for that – will have a think.
Historic activity animations coming soon! (There’s a couple of bugs to be squashed first though.) Individual bike movement data is not available, just station data, but there are lots of characteristic patterns indeed, such as the big commuter rush, and redistribution activity – the latter being particularly easy to spot overnight as there’s little else going on, but I think it happens throughout the day too. The FedEx animation is really nice.
I have just remembered the Fed-Ex flights video
http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/bertinie/visuale/2006/11/animated_visualization_of_fede.html
Animated visualization of FedEx “hub and spoke” logistics
Maybe something like that would be interesting? An animation of the bikes’ usage over a period. Obviously individual bikes can’t be tracked like Fed-Ex aircraft (or can they Boris, do tell?) but by looking at station activity interesting patterns may emerge.
You could see I expect the morning and evening commutes and also management re-allocation moves.
Thanks for the interactive usage map. Looks to be a lot more useful than the official one.
One small thing is that I found the 24 hour graphs quite hard to deal with. I would *much* prefer the time axis to be in time of day as opposed to hours before now. This is not a manner of using time that my brain seems familiar with. Maybe of course I am in minority of one:) Graphs covering longer time periods might be interesting too. Week, month, year (well it might be useful eventually).
Hi Rob – I’ve now put vertical bars on at 2 hourly intervals (otherwise it looked a bit cluttered) – hope these are useful.
Fred – I’ve speeded up the ticker, it should now manage around 25 updates in the two minute window.
The map is very useful, but I have one comment:
(Background: my use of the BBs is from Waterloo to bank during the busy period in the morning)
The graphs for each docking station are useful for planning my commute – ie I can see ahead of time which station is likely to have bikes available – so I aim for a particular station or two (even if I then have to amend my route closer to the time using an iPhone app) . However the graphs would be more useful if there were vertical bars at hourly (or two hourly) intervals to be better able to judge the empty / full periods for each station.
Your visualization of the Boris Bikes is great, and although I’m in Montreal, I look at it probably quite a bit more than logic should dictate.
However, at “busy” times, when there are a lot of updates (docks getting empty, filled up, etc) there isn’t enough time for all the updates to show up on the screen before the 120 second timer runs out and the whole thing gets refreshed.
You may want to consider changing that around a bit.
Thanks for the pretty graphics 🙂
Fred
Thanks. It’s custom rendered, specifically for the visualisation, as a non-distracting background map, and is stored on the same server. Therefore, I wouldn’t like to guarantee availability of them for other projects (I might need to move them around or restyle them.) It’s rendered in Mapnik, using a stylesheet heavily cut down from the standard OpenStreetMap “osm.xml”.
It’s really a beautiful map!
Question: The map in the background is OSM, but how is it rendered, and are the tiles available somewhere?