I’ve now added a historic view of my cycle hire dock visualisation – you can “replay” the dock capacity changes over the last 48 hours by clicking on the “Animation” link or going directly to the animation page and then clicking “Start Animation”
By default, a different colour/shape scheme is used – the circles grow or shrink and become redder or duller, as the docks fill up or empty respectively. You can change the colours used with the drop-down, as normal.
The circles are being redrawn by your browser for each frame of the animation, and speeds vary greatly on your browser. Each frame represents 10 minutes of real time. The redrawing is intensive and might occasionally lock up your computer!
On my reasonably fast computer, the maximum frame rate I can get is:
- Chrome or Safari: 7 frames a second
- Firefox: 3 frames a second
- Internet Explorer 8: 2 frames a second (zoomed in)
If Internet Explorer is zoomed out to match the default zooms in the other browsers, the rate drops to 1 frame every 8 seconds…
The distinctive weekday commuting patterns are easy to spot, with the morning rush into the centre, followed by the evening rush back out to the edges and the station terminals. Distribution vehicles movements can be inferred, particularly during the wee small hours when there is little other activity.
10 replies on “Animation of Cycle Hire Patterns”
[…] There have been benefits for researchers too. The technology used in the cycle scheme offers the opportunity to see, in real-time, flows of people around the city. Geography PhD student, James Cheshire, posted a video showing ‘hot spots’ of cycle usage, which was made up of images from Oliver O’Brien’s animation of cycle hire patterns. […]
Sorry, forgot the most important bit – thanks for the site.
DJ Clark said:
“difficult to study the pattern whilst watching the clock. Perhaps the map background could brighten up at dawn and darken at dusk?”
I agree with the problem. How about an audio solution? Spoken times or just a click or beep every hour or whatever seemed good.
Awesome visualization. Certainly pushes the browser, but worth it. However, if you run into limits know that Mapnik trunk now makes it much easier to draw dynamically sized points if you ever need to fallback to fully raster image frames. See: http://trac.mapnik.org/wiki/MarkersSymbolizer#DynamicEllipses
So cool – thanks for adding this. Are there any plans to have longer term graphs of distribution inbalance/bikes in use as at the moment it is only the last 24h.
Oliver, I am lost for words. Simply awesome! Well done.
Wonderful,not sure how to measure from rate but its seems pretty fast to me.
But difficult to study the pattern whilst watching the clock. Perhaps the map background could brighten up at dawn and darken at dusk?
It’s using your computer clock as a basis for the time (as the animation is powered in Javascript, i.e. on your computer) – I’ve fixed it to show London time now.
That’s pretty cool!
One question: Do Londoners go to work at like 4am, and leave at 2pm; or is the clock a wee bit inaccurate; or is it just my browser?
[…] animation of the pulsing city’s heart http://oliverobrien.co.uk/2010/09/animation-of-cycle-hire-patterns/ (via @oobr and @tokumin) · · · ◊ ◊ ◊ · · · […]