Tube Stations in London – Visualisation

I was inspired by seeing this map and associated article on the New York Times website, linked from Going Underground, to create a similar mashup/visualisation of entry/exit volumes from the 300-odd tube stations in London. On their website, Transport for London provide the metrics for entries/exits from the stations, between 2003 and 2008, broken up into rush-hour, regular and weekend travel.

Each circle’s area is directly proportional to the flow numbers for that station (click on the circle to see the numbers.) The circles are rescaled between the first metric (total flows) and the rest, so direct comparison of metrics is possible except between the first and others, Blue circles represent an increase in flow and red a decrease.

If the mass of circles are obscuring each other, zoom in!

You can try it out here.

Some technical notes:

The background map is a custom render of OpenStreetMap data, with the tube lines highlighted in their traditional colour – it doesn’t always look quite “right” when you zoom in, due to the way the lines are tagged in my own copy of the OpenStreetMap database. The stations are even harder to disambiguate, so I’m using a free source from Wikimedia Commons, this means they don’t always line up.

Because your browser gets a copy of all the flow data when you load the page (yes I’ve heard of AJAX) it does run a little slowly in Internet Explorer, particularly the slider bars – these allow you to “drag” through the range of metrics or years.