I presented on the Mapping London blog, at the Society of Cartographers’ 48th Annual Conference which was at UCL this year, showing a general outline of the blogs and some maps featured on it, plus some work done by James and I. My presentation is here (6MB PDF). Note that the attribution for the many maps featured on the presentation is at the end.
After Google abruptly turned off their XML weather feed this week, I’ve switched to using Yahoo! Weather (an RSS feed) for the CityDashboard weather forecast module. Yahoo uses WOEIDs rather than city names, which takes a bit longer to configure but is unambiguous – Google just used the city name, so required careful specification to get Birmingham (UK) weather rather than Birmingham (Alabama, US) weather, for example. Google’s feed was undocumented (so, strictly, private) but was widely used on other websites.
I’m using the weather icons (which link to the codes supplied by Yahoo) from the WeatherIcon project.
It works well. Thank you Yahoo!
Maybe Yahoo! is about to become the new Google?
Many of the bike share operators whose systems I’ve mapped have accounts on Twitter – but do they use them to reply to customers, notify of system changes, or just tweet promotional measures? Have they built up an appropriately large set of followers? Do they tweet often? An active Twitter account is good customer service, one that replies to queries is great customer service! (N.B. Google has translated the Velib conversation above from French.)
There are 24 operators, for which I able to find a relevant Twitter account. The following table shows how they use it. This does of course leave several hundred other operators (many very small) for whom I could not find an account.
| City | System Name | Size (Bikes) | Twitter Account | Foll-owers | Repl-ies | Bad News | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mexico City | Ecobici | 1100 | @ecobici | 21475 | Yes | Yes | ***** |
| Miami Beach | DecoBike | 540 | @DecoBike | 10321^ | Yes | No | **** |
| London | Barclays Cycle Hire | 6300 | @BarclaysCycle | 6673 | No | Yes | *** |
| Washington DC/Arlington | Capital Bikeshare | 1400 | @bikeshare | 5374 | Yes | Yes | ***** |
| Denver | B-Cycle | 400 | @Denver_Bcycle | 4652 | No | Yes | *** |
| Minneapolis | Nice Ride | 1230 | @niceridemn | 4100 | Yes | Yes | ***** |
| Paris | Velib | 15700 | @Velib_Paris | 3094 | Yes | Yes | **** |
| Boston | Hubway | 700 | @hubway | 3741 | Yes | Yes | ***** |
| Montreal | BIXI | 4300 | @BIXImontreal | 3214 | Yes | Yes | **** |
| Toronto | BIXI | 820 | @BIXItoronto | 2801 | Yes | Yes | **** |
| Barcelona | Bicing | 3800 | @bicing | 2358 | Yes | Yes | **** |
| Boulder | B-Cycle | 120 | @Boulder_Bcycle | 1541 | Yes | Yes | ***** |
| Lille | V’Lille | 1550 | @transpole_actu | 1322^^ | Yes | Yes | *** |
| Bordeaux | VCub | 1300 | @tbc | 1118^^ | No | No | * |
| Melbourne | Melbourne Bike Share | 550 | @MelbBikeShare | 1095 | No | No | *** |
| Chattanooga | Bike Chattanooga | 230 | @BikeChattanooga | 672 | Yes | No | **** |
| Kansas City | B-Cycle | 80 | @BikeShareKC | 608 | No | Yes | **** |
| Broward County | B-Cycle | 150 | @browardbcycle | 498 | Yes | No | **** |
| Rennes | Le Velo Star | 630 | @levelostar | 384 | Yes | Yes | *** |
| San Antonio | B-Cycle | 200 | @SA_Bcycle | 323 | No | Yes | **** |
| Madison | B-Cycle | 220 | @Madison_Bcycle | 319 | No | Yes | **** |
| Tel-Aviv | Tel-o-fun | 860 | @tel_o_fun | 226 | Yes | Yes | *** |
| Brussels | Villo | 3100 | @Villo_brussels | 152 | No | Yes | ** |
| Ottawa | Capitale | 230 | @capitalbixi | 145 | Yes | Yes | *** |
^ = Account also handles smaller bike share systems in other cities.
^^ = Account also handles other public transport in the city.
Operators get a star for being on Twitter, another for having more followers than bikes on the street, another for replying directly to at least some user queries on Twitter, another for tweeting and least some system issues and other “bad news”, and another for having made at least a couple of tweets in the last 48 hours.
Large (500+ bike) systems with no active official Twitter account that appear on bikes.oobrien.com: Brisbane, Luxembourg City, Lyon, Milan, Nice, Saragossa, Valencia and Vienna. Not including Chinese or South Korea systems as Twitter appears to not be widely adopted in these countries, at least in terms of official transport accounts. Metrics were measured on 21 August 2012.
I was in Vancouver at the end of June for the Velo-City conference – which is the cycling industry’s conference on bike sharing and urban cycling.
The lead sponsors were PBSC who are behind the technology for many of the larger North American systems (Montreal, Minneapolis, Washington DC) so there was was a strong bike sharing theme through the conference, and they had a prominent stand with bikes in the various scheme liveries. The stand also had a couple of design updates from the ones you see in London and elsewhere – a “totem-pole” for capturing sunlight to provide power, and a slots that takes credit cards as well as the existing key-fobs. There is no indication that these updates will be making it to London anytime soon though. B-Cycle, who supply and run many of the smaller systems in the US (e.g. Denver, San Antonio) also had a stand with their own Trek-built bikes, which have a distinctly different look.
I presented on my Bike Sharing Map showing the detail for various cities around the world, it was the middle part of a 90 minute presentation at three geographical scales – the first segment given by Russell Meddin on his global map of bike shares, and the last segment being given by Andrea Beatty on detailed information available for a single city through mobile apps.
I also sat in on several other presentations – some of the most interesting being given by far-eastern presenters, particularly the Chinese. This is because China has 7 of the largest 10 bike sharing systems in the whole world, but getting information on them can be difficult, so it was interesting to find out the information from people on the ground.
One of the most interesting talks focused on the modal shift in Chinese and Western cities – many of the former are shifting from bicycle to car, while the rise of the bus in Western cities was cited by the contrast between Thatcher’s 1968 “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure” with the 2008 appearance of a red London bus in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics closing ceremony! In China, lanes that were once dedicated for bicycles have been turned over to extra space for cars.
My personal highlight was being able to borrow one of the PBSC bikes and take it for a spin around Stanley Park – a lovely circuit and on a very pleasant afternoon. Apparently Vancouver does not have very many rain free days in the summer, but it was warm and sunny throughout my stay.
Vancouver is itself getting a bike sharing system, probably next summer. Vancouver’s existing cycle insfrastructure is brilliant – properly segregated cycle lane, with planters and cycle parking to separate the lanes from the cars. The operator will have its work cut out for the scheme to be a success though – helmets are required by law in Vancouver. There was some talk of a system where every docking station comes with a helmet vending machine, and on return the helmet gets safety-checked and automatically cleaned ready for the next user.
Thanks to Russell and Paul for letting me crash in the apartment they rented, B-Cycle for covering my conference fee, and CASA for flying me there.
Here’s the announced timetable for the transition and reopening of the Olympic Park and a few other Olympic-related venues:
Regular readers will have noticed that my last seven posts, and the great majority of posts this year, have been about the Olympic Games – specifically, the Olympic Park in East London. I’ve been pretty excited about London 2012, but I’m just as excited about what comes next for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, to give it its post-games name. Yep Sport started as an orienteering events and training blog – but Attackpoint largely serves that purpose for me now, so while I’ll continue to mention orienteering, cycling, running, hillwalking and OpenStreetMap from time-to-time, I’m going to focus more closely on what happens to the Olympic Park in the next few years – and not just because I think it will make an amazing venue for a future orienteering race to complement the City Race that I co-founded in 2008.
I already have a couple of ties to the Olympic Park. Until recently, I lived just the other side of Victoria Park, and could see the lighting gantries of the Olympic Stadium, under construction, from my kitchen window. I’m now further up the Lea Valley but still just a short cycle ride away from the Park. Also I was responsible for naming one of the five neighbourhoods that will be built, over the next 15 years, in the park – namely East Wick – it’s the bit east of Hackney Wick appropriately enough, and I like the name “Wick” as I spent a year near Wick in the far north of Scotland. Coincidently, my current duties as an Olympic volunteer, or Games Maker, have me working by the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in the north-west part of the park – which is the bit that will become East Wick.
At the moment I’m gathering some links relevant to the legacy plans for the park.
Top: CGI image from the LLDC website. Bottom: Aerial image of the park just before the Olympic Games, from Google Maps.
There’s a new, temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, which being developed by my colleague Steven James Gray as part of his PhD.
For each venue, the collectors count the number of Tweets in the last hour that have latitude/longitude information stamped on them, that are located within an area radiating around the centre of each stadium or arena. Unfortunately this excludes the majority of relevant tweets, as most mobile Twitter applications don’t include this information by default – stadium designs can also interfere with the accuracy of the GPS on mobile phones – when I was in the Velodrome for a test event, my iPhone was convinced I was in, ironically, Beijing, and nothing could be done to convince it otherwise.
Nonetheless, the tweets that the collectors do manage to capture still give an indication of how lively and busy each venue is. A collector covering the whole Olympic Park is also included – this includes the venues within the park and also the various promenades and green areas. Most people, before or after visiting the venue they have tickets for, are remaining in the wider park.
On the way we discovered an obscure Twitter bug: including a search radius that spreads across the Prime Meridian (0 degrees longitude) causes an error to appear from Twitter – fixing the centre of the search point on the Meridian itself works around this bug. Until we spotted the but, the Greenwich Park collector was always reporting zero, as the Meridian line goes through the park.
After the Olympics, we hope to reuse the collectors to give an indication of Twitter activity in certain key London hotspots, such as Shoreditch and Covent Garden. Potentially, we would be able to include a similar panel for the other seven UK cities on CityDashboard.
Over at the Big Data Toolkit blog, Steve talks in detail about the Twitter collectors.
The London Legacy Development Corporation, who have the job of turning the Olympic Park into a public park post-games, have released a tantalising artist’s impression of the Olympic Park as it might look in Spring 2014, when much of it will have opened to the public as a public park.
Here’s a recent view, taken just a few days before the start of the Olympic Games:
Here’s the LLDC’s image of the park in 2014:
The main differences are the removal of the temporary spans on the bridges, making them more slender, and the greening of much of the tarmac/concrete plazas with natural features. The temporary seating stands around the Aquatic Centre disappear, as does the whole Water Polo arena. Bridge “C” between the stadium “island” and the rest of the park has disappeared completely too. The huge “Spotty Bridge” has also disappeared, with just two slender bridges on either side of it remaining.
Here’s what the park might look like in 2030, with the addition of various blocks of housing – this is a modified version of the above image:
It looks like the park will be an exciting location for a future park orienteering race, possibly making a compelling weekend by combining it with an associated City Race.
Top photo: Dominic Lipinski/PA. Other images: London Legacy Development Corporation.
The medals aren’t the only shiny things at London 2012. Pin trading is a long Olympic tradition, and while, for the first week, I was mildly curious about the lanyards of some of my fellow volunteers being adored with various badges, a couple of donations meant that I was hooked by the middle weekend of the Olympics.
Above is the current set on my lanyard.
Everyone seems to have different rules for trading pins – I’ve made up my own, which means my collection tends to have smaller and more specialised pins than most others:
So far, my pin trading narrative has been:
| Pin | Trade Type | Who | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Games Maker colour | Given | LOCOG | 4 (AABF) |
| Apple iPad (black) | Given | Friend | 3 (ACG) |
| Apple iPhone (white) | Collected | Apple Store | 3 (ACG) |
| Russian flag | Given | Journalist | 5 (ACDEG) |
| NBC | Swapped iPad (3pts) | Army soldier | 3 (ACD) |
| Sverige | Swapped Games Maker (4pts) | Army soldier | 2 (AC) |
| Apple iPad (white) | Collected | Apple Store | 3 (ACG) |
| Samsung (Sherlock) | Collected | Samsung booth | 1 (A) |
| USA flag | Swapped Sverige (2pts) | Volunteer | 4 (ACEG) |
| Saudi Arabia NOC | Swapped NBC (3pts) | G4S guard | 3 (ACE) |
| Samsung (Shakespeare) | Collected | Samsung booth | 1 (A) |
| Games Maker bronze | Given | LOCOG | 4 (AABF) |
| OBS IBC building | Swapped Saudi Arabia NOC (3pts) | Collector | 6 (AABCDE) |
| Samsung (Umbrella) | Given | Friend | 1 (A) |
| Samsung (Umbrella) | Given | Friend | 1 (A) |
| Samsung (King Arthur) | Swapped Samsung (Umbrella) (1pt) | Bus despatcher | 1 (A) |
| Fuji Television | Swapped 3x Samsung + iPad (6pts) | Bus despatcher | 5 (ACDFH) |
Some people are weighed down with around 20 pins dangling around their necks, while some hide them away on their bags (which is the only place where we are officially allowed to have them) and others don’t have them at all…
The main area for “professional” pin traders is not the offical venue – the Coca-Cola Pin Trading building near the Orbit – but actually it’s at what is perhaps the most exciting area of the whole games. The area is a small 200m long, 30m wide concrete plaza. On the south side is Stratford International station, with the Javelin high-speed trains to King’s Cross. On the north side is the slightly useless Stratford International DLR station. To the east is an entrance for athletes to the Olympic Village, and to the west is the media entrance to the Olympic Park and the shuttle buses that run to various park venues and the Main Press Centre.
The area is accessible without a ticket to events in the Olympic Park – and so is the best place for non ticket-holders to see athletes, particularly as the press often use this “neutral” area to carry out interviews with their athletes. On the south side of the plaza, adjacent to Stratford International, is where 10-15 pin traders have set up their collections.
To start a collection off, the Samsung and Apple stores, at Stratford City, are giving away pins at a steady rate. Some collectors will swap these for a big collection of old (pre-2012) Olympic pins, and you can go from there.
Yes! It is possible! There may not be any Barclays Cycle Hire docking stations in the Olympic Park itself, possibly due to “Barclays” not being the official financial services provider of the Olympics but more likely because of the logistics of rebalancing flows to/from major events and the safety aspects of a crowded space, but that doesn’t mean you cannot “Boris Bike” to near the edge of the park. Even better, you get to use one of the two quieter entrances to the park, avoiding the huge queues and crowd mechanics of the approach from Stratford through Westfield.
The above map is adapted from my live docking station map and shows the nearest docking stations to these two park entrances. Cycle to these docking stations, leave the bike at one of them, and then follow the arrows to walk the final kilometre or so.
Both entrances are likely to be quick ways into and out from the park. If you have your own bike, there is a large secure cycle park in Victoria Park, from where you can walk to Victoria Gate.
There are several Olympic venues in Central London, which can therefore also be approached by Barclays Cycle Hire bikes, but be warned TfL is removing the docking stations that are very near, or inside, the venues themselves. A full list is here.
Background map based on OpenStreetMap data and designed by The Guardian.