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.
Hi there: can you add a little more about how the map was put together? I’m interested in mapping frequencies, and am currently doing this manually! Thanks
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Another great map. Congrats!
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.
I want to be able to track my own rides. Like mapmyrun – but for Boris Bikes.
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.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Honglae Cho, topcitybird and others. topcitybird said: More interesting #cyclehire stat visualisation – this time the journeys: http://t.co/gpze2sJ via @oobr […]
Chris – good point. I have now made the colours red/blue instead of red/green.
[…] The data was released after a Freedom of Information request by open data developer Adrian Short, and has spawned several innovative visualisations, including maps of the most popular routes, routes taken by the most used bikes and an interactive map of all journeys from all stations. […]
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?
[…] also recommend Ollie O’Brien’s (@oobr) brilliant interactive visualisations these data. Tags: ArcGIS, barclays cycle, borisbike, Geography, Interests, Map, R, R Maps, TFL, […]
congratulations on putting this together – its an amazing amount of analysis in a hugely user-friendly way!