Author: Oliver O'Brien

Mapping London’s Cycling Census Dataset

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 15 October 2013
10 Comments on Mapping London’s Cycling Census Dataset

londontraffic

The London Cycling Census Map is an interactive map I’ve created, showing traffic flows on key corridors in central London. The counts were collected by Transport for London in around 170 locations, in April. TfL released some sample statistics from the dataset in a report published on their website, but the original dataset was not released – however Andrew Gilligan, the Greater London Authority’s cycling commissioner, obtained the data and forward it on to a number of people, including (indirectly) me. I took the data, consolidated it, and created this map. The most tedious bit was pointing the arrows in the right direction!

There are three time periods for which you can show data: AM Peak (7am to 10am), PM Peak (4pm to 7pm) and All Day ~~(which is, I believe, a 24-hour sample.)~~ which is from 6am to 8pm. The locations chosen are generally ones where high numbers of cyclists travel, so some roads which have high numbers of other vehicles, but not bicycles, e.g. Oxford Street, are not included.

Cycling along key corridors in London is highly time dependent – in the below extract, morning (red) and evening (green) flows for cyclists are compared. Cyclists generally travel away from Clerkenwell, to the east and the west, in the morning, returning to it in the evening. The other travel modes generally don’t show this directionality on this road – cars in particular generally travel in both directions during both peaks. I would hypothesis that the cyclists are accessing this road from Goswell Road, which unfortunately wasn’t included in the census.

london_ampm

So what does the data show?

There are several roads where there are more bikes on the streets than any other type of vehicles.
Bicycle flow is highly direction, unlike that for most other forms of transport.
There are certain routes which are popular with certain kinds of traffic. There are four main east/west corridors in central London. Cars dominate the north-most (Euston Road) and the south-most (Victoria Embankment) ones. Taxis heavily use Holborn, while cyclists mainly use Old Street/Theobald’s Road. You can see all four of these corridors in the map extract at the top of this article.
Equivalent north-south links show little separation of vehicle types.
Elephant & Castle remains a complicated junction with large numbers of cyclists and buses, depending on the direction, road and time of day.

A note on the arrows

The map uses the vector styling capabilities of OpenLayers, with a custom SVG “arrow” symbol. Symbols in OpenLayers are always positioned with their centre over the location point, so to have them pointing away from the location, I had to add a hidden stalk to each arrow – you can see the stalk when clicking on it. My custom SVG for the arrows is:

OpenLayers.Renderer.symbol.arrow = [1, 0, 0, -3, -1, 0, 0, -0.5, 0, 3, 0, -0.5];

I’m using 0, 0 as the point on the arrow that corresponds to the underlying location – but it doesn’t need to be that, i.e. the location of 0, 0 does not affect where OpenLayer actually pins your symbol on your point location.

And finally…

Red arrows are taxis, blue arrows are buses. Proof, perhaps, of the oft-quoted saying that it’s a battle to find a London taxi driver willing to go south of the river:

londontaxis

The map was created as an output of EUNOIA, a European Union funded project to model travel mobility in major European cities using novel datasets. UCL CASA is the UK university partner for the project.

You can view the map here.
View alternative version of the map – uses OpenCycleMap as a basemap.
Download the data here which I have augmented with bearings.

Cycling

London’s Cycling Revolution

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 11 October 2013
No Comments on London’s Cycling Revolution

Above is part of a graphic created to highlight the dramatic changes in London’s non-casual cycling population. It is a map showing the proportion of people that travel to work by bicycle (compared to the overall population that travels to work) – each of London’s 620-odd wards being coloured by the resulting value, that comes from the 2011 census. QGIS was used to produce the map, the colour ramp used is a “fire” one, with the highest values corresponding to “white hot” colours, then cooling through orange and red for lower values. Yellow dots show the current (pre-December 2013) extent of the Barclays Cycle Hire system, which is revealingly at odds with where the cyclists actually are.

As a keen cyclist myself, it’s fascinating seeing how Hackney is “lit up” in the map, and also how barriers such as the North Circular Road and the Lea Valley act, apparently both physically and psychologically, to stop cyclists commuting across them. Outwith these constraints, traditionally affluent south-west London boroughs have combined with “hipster central” new-wealth north-east boroughs of Hackney and Islington to create an “axis of cycle commuting” across the capital city. The northern parts of Tower Hamlets, and the eastern parts of Camden, are also starting to turn red, as the Hackney cycling cultural influence slowly spreads. Herne Hill stands out in south London as being a popular cycling location, perhaps inspired by the legacy of the Herne Hill Velodrome (from the 1948 Olympics) living on. Highgate is also another hotspot. Perhaps people commute down its famous steep hills to work in central London, and then take the bike back home on the train?

The full graphic also includes a table listing the top 100 areas (wards) for the main measure. The numbers on the map correspond to the top 20 wards in this table – striking to see how many of them are in Hackney borough. The data came from the UK Census 2011 ward-aggregated data releases made earlier this year by the Official of National Statistics.

You can see the full graphic here which includes a number of “headline numbers” I haven’t mentioned here. I’ve listed the 100 wards from the graphic’s table below for convenience.

The “Total Num” is the population (aged 16-74) that travels to work, so not including those that work from home, are students, or don’t work. “Num by bicycle” is the subset of this population that use a bicycle as their primary means of commuting to work.

Rank	Ward	Borough	Total Num	Num by bicycle	% by bicycle
1	Clissold	Hackney	5988	1226	20.5%
2	Stoke Newington Central	Hackney	6269	1274	20.3%
3	Queensbridge	Hackney	6154	1235	20.1%
4	Dalston	Hackney	7199	1395	19.4%
5	Hackney Downs	Hackney	5636	1040	18.5%
6	Hackney Central	Hackney	5663	993	17.5%
7	Victoria	Hackney	5702	955	16.8%
8	Leabridge	Hackney	5946	991	16.7%
9	Wick	Hackney	4540	695	15.3%
10	Chatham	Hackney	5445	829	15.2%
11	De Beauvoir	Hackney	6765	1009	14.9%
12	Lordship	Hackney	4620	675	14.6%
13	Mildmay	Islington	5968	830	13.9%
14	King’s Park	Hackney	3910	542	13.9%
15	Highbury East	Islington	5765	795	13.8%
16	Highgate	Camden	4538	607	13.4%
17	Bethnal Green North	Tower Hamlets	6027	805	13.4%
18	Cazenove	Hackney	5221	689	13.2%
19	Herne Hill	Lambeth	7751	1017	13.1%
20	Haggerston	Hackney	6564	837	12.8%
21	Weavers	Tower Hamlets	6087	776	12.8%
22	St George’s	Islington	5751	703	12.2%
23	Cantelowes	Camden	5127	615	12.0%
24	Kentish Town	Camden	6385	744	11.7%
25	Bow West	Tower Hamlets	5863	671	11.4%
26	Village	Southwark	5608	635	11.3%
27	Brownswood	Hackney	5889	660	11.2%
28	Palace Riverside	Hammersmith and Fulham	3285	357	10.9%
29	Hoxton	Hackney	6844	737	10.8%
30	Highbury West	Islington	8127	871	10.7%
31	Brunswick Park	Southwark	5977	637	10.7%
32	Brixton Hill	Lambeth	8544	910	10.7%
33	The Lane	Southwark	7025	740	10.5%
34	Barnsbury	Islington	5771	600	10.4%
35	St Peter’s	Islington	5799	601	10.4%
36	St Mary’s Park	Wandsworth	8833	913	10.3%
37	Wandsworth Common	Wandsworth	7133	726	10.2%
38	Tollington	Islington	6239	628	10.1%
39	Tulse Hill	Lambeth	7544	757	10.0%
40	Junction	Islington	5567	558	10.0%
41	Vassall	Lambeth	6700	660	9.9%
42	Camden Town with Primrose Hill	Camden	5546	543	9.8%
43	Bow East	Tower Hamlets	7244	707	9.8%
44	Stroud Green	Haringey	6252	609	9.7%
45	Gospel Oak	Camden	4540	442	9.7%
46	Peckham Rye	Southwark	6669	642	9.6%
47	Shaftesbury	Wandsworth	8703	837	9.6%
48	Mortlake and Barnes Common	Richmond upon Thames	5159	495	9.6%
49	East Dulwich	Southwark	6536	624	9.6%
50	Oval	Lambeth	8270	789	9.5%
51	Northcote	Wandsworth	8532	811	9.5%
52	Canonbury	Islington	5704	541	9.5%
53	St Mary’s	Islington	5967	563	9.4%
54	Clapham Common	Lambeth	7380	695	9.4%
55	Prince’s	Lambeth	6938	650	9.4%
56	Askew	Hammersmith and Fulham	7020	656	9.3%
57	Thamesfield	Wandsworth	8505	791	9.3%
58	South Camberwell	Southwark	5982	553	9.2%
59	Holloway	Islington	6869	633	9.2%
60	Munster	Hammersmith and Fulham	5953	548	9.2%
61	Mile End and Globe Town	Tower Hamlets	5856	537	9.2%
62	East Sheen	Richmond upon Thames	4425	404	9.1%
63	Ravenscourt Park	Hammersmith and Fulham	4917	448	9.1%
64	Clapham Town	Lambeth	7986	724	9.1%
65	Queenstown	Wandsworth	8944	810	9.1%
66	Newington	Southwark	6546	589	9.0%
67	Nightingale	Wandsworth	8062	721	8.9%
68	Stockwell	Lambeth	7367	658	8.9%
69	Barnes	Richmond upon Thames	4146	370	8.9%
70	Ham, Petersham and Richmond Riverside	Richmond upon Thames	4195	373	8.9%
71	Thurlow Park	Lambeth	6497	574	8.8%
72	Clerkenwell	Islington	5188	455	8.8%
73	Caledonian	Islington	5935	518	8.7%
74	Finsbury Park	Islington	6373	548	8.6%
75	Crouch End	Haringey	6647	567	8.5%
76	Fulham Reach	Hammersmith and Fulham	5892	497	8.4%
77	Thornton	Lambeth	6235	525	8.4%
78	Balham	Wandsworth	8660	729	8.4%
79	Fulham Broadway	Hammersmith and Fulham	5583	469	8.4%
80	Hillrise	Islington	5077	426	8.4%
81	Ferndale	Lambeth	8868	744	8.4%
82	Larkhall	Lambeth	9197	771	8.4%
83	Shepherd’s Bush Green	Hammersmith and Fulham	6244	521	8.3%
84	Sands End	Hammersmith and Fulham	5947	489	8.2%
85	Coldharbour	Lambeth	7267	597	8.2%
86	Colville	Kensington and Chelsea	3896	318	8.2%
87	Addison	Hammersmith and Fulham	6154	500	8.1%
88	Fairfield	Wandsworth	9123	741	8.1%
89	Bethnal Green South	Tower Hamlets	5471	443	8.1%
90	Notting Barns	Kensington and Chelsea	3657	294	8.0%
91	Streatham Hill	Lambeth	7180	577	8.0%
92	Chiswick Riverside	Hounslow	5428	433	8.0%
93	Tudor	Kingston upon Thames	4128	329	8.0%
94	Hammersmith Broadway	Hammersmith and Fulham	5574	444	8.0%
95	Camberwell Green	Southwark	6471	513	7.9%
96	Queens Park	Brent	7598	600	7.9%
97	Haverstock	Camden	4900	386	7.9%
98	Spitalfields and Banglatown	Tower Hamlets	4619	362	7.8%
99	West Putney	Wandsworth	6772	527	7.8%
100	Fulwell and Hampton Hill	Richmond upon Thames	4747	369	7.8%

The graphic was produced in association with Mediarun and Bolt Burdon Kemp.

Data Graphics Geodemographics London

Data Windows

This is a data visualisation artwork created by Dr Cheshire (@spatialanalysis) and myself. We were invited to submit an entry to 10X10 Drawing the City London, run by the building design charity Article 25. The submissions, including various from “real” artists and architects, will then be auctioned in November to raise funds for the charity’s projects.

Our technological, cartographical and geographical skills are almost certainly better than our artistic ability, so we decided to let technology create our artwork. We took the 2011 census data for the target area (Shoreditch) and combined it with building data from Ordnance Survey Vector Map District, creating a 3×3 panel. Colorbrewer colour ramps, supplied in QGIS 2.0, were used, to colour each panel differently.

The resulting artwork is completely based on open data, licensed under the Open Government Licence.

A single physical copy was printed directly onto white canvas, using specialised equipment operated by Miles Irving at the Drawing Office in UCL Geography. He mounted it onto a wooden frame. The resulting artwork can be seen above and has now been passed to Article 25 for their exhibition and auction next month.

Update: They invited us back for 2014 and 2015, and we produced maps for these latter two editions too.

2014 was taken from an old high-resolution Ordnance Survey map, which we vectorised and stylised:

Our 2015 map was from GIS digital raster data – using a high-resolution DEM for our square, and styling it in Illustrator:

Cycling Olympic Park

Five Not-so-great Pieces of Cycling Infrastructure in London

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 4 October 2013

Following on from my previous article on five great pieces of cycling infrastructure, here’s five things that didn’t make the list, and why:

Cycle Superhighways

These were never intended to be “Dutch” fully segregated, high-capacity cycle routes. They are there to assist confident cyclists getting to work and back along the major roads. The project included reconfiguring many junctions to make them safer for cyclists too. However, too often, the “Superhighways” are just specially surfaced sections of roads, with no physical or optical barrier stopping trucks and cars driving along them. Worse, some sections are badly breaking up, with the surface disintegrating – most likely due to motorised traffic rather than the bicycles themselves. I understand that the project included funds to keep these maintained but that’s clearly not happening.

A real Cycle Superhighway would have been a lane in each road closing to motor traffic, which is happening in other cities (Vancouver, Washington DC to name but two). But with one measure of the transport authority’s performance being the average speed of traffic across its network, this was never likely to happen on the trunk roads.

Tavistock Place / Torrington Place Cycleway

A very well used two-way cycle facility on a key east-west cycle route in London, the cyclists’ parallel to the heavily trafficked Euston Road. Sadly it is so busy with cyclists now that, at rush hour, with the lane only wide enough for one bicycle, the queues can stretch back beyond the previous junction. It’s therefore faster to cycle along the road during the rush hour – except you get hassled by taxis and other traffic when you do, because apparently the rest of the road is out of bounds to cyclists if there’s a cycleway.

The cycleway also includes an odd section where the two cycle lanes pass each other on their left – minor cycle-cycle collisions are frequent. Pedestrians often also cross the lanes without looking, with poor sight-lines, resulting in frequent frustrated yells from oncoming cyclists. The route needs the Royal College Street armadillo treatment, and the Camden Cycle Campaign has recently launched a project to encourage this to happen.

One-way Streets, even for Cyclists

Encouragingly, two-way cycling on one-way streets is happening in quite a few places now – Hackney borough and the City of London Corporation, in particularly, have been taking the simple steps to allow quiet roads to be one-way for traffic, but two way for cyclists, without building complicated and often unnecessary dedicated cycle routes. Most European cities – Paris, Brussels and Vienna to name but three, are full of these kinds of streets. However, in London a great many side streets remain as impermeable for narrow bicycles as they do for big cars and trucks. There is often no reason why other than historical convention.

Cycle Routes in the Olympic Park / East Village

A whole brand-new neighbourhood being created, and a great chance to create a sustainable transport utopia, along with direct, spacious cycleways between east and central London, avoiding the traditional big roads? It’s still early days, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. There’s just the “usual” cycle lanes which cars can drive in. There are a few dedicated sections, which are wide and straight, but it’s not all joined up. A real missed opportunity.

Removal of Cycle Paths

For streets managed by the central transport authority, rather than the individual boroughs, it seems that dedicated bicycle paths are out of fashion. The photo shows a cycle path on a wide pavement, about to be bulldozed away. It was never a great path, and not particularly popularly used (and often walked upon by pedestrians, hence the sign here), but it was still better than being on the road with the traffic. Original plans for the road rebuild here showed the cycle path being retained (Map D) but the plans were quietly updated and now show it gone. It will be replaced by a wide pavement with trees, the three-lane one-way road beside going to a two-lane two-way road. You can tell its a centrally managed street, by the way, because of the lines on the edge of the street being pink rather than yellow.

There are other examples of junction rebuilds happening where dedicated infrastructure for cyclists appears to be being designed out.

First three photos: Google Streetview. Fourth photograph: Diamond Geezer.

Conferences OpenLayers

FOSS4G 2013 Conference

Well, that was good.

September this year was Maptember with numerous conferences with a geographical flavour taking place in the East Midlands. The undoubted highlight for me was FOSS4G 2013, the annual conference for OSGeo which travels around the world, this year it was conveniently in Nottingham, so I was able to make it along relatively easily. FOSS4G is Free and Open Source Software for GIS and as such the conference is a good mix of open-source technology and geography.

As I will be spending some time this month writing a book chapter on open source GIS, the conference was an unmissable event for me, even though a clash with another conference (ECCS) abroad meant logistics were tricky – in the end, a 6am wakeup call necessitated and lots of freshly ground coffee (very big thumbs up to the conference for that – a first) helped me out.

Just over 800 people attended the conference and there were up to 9 parallel streams. With many talks sounding very interesting it was often hard to pick a track to follow, not least as there was a 10 minute walk between the two main conference venues. I had brought my bike up from London, which helped.

Highlights of the conference for me were:

A keynote by Ben Hennig of Worldmapper fame on the need for the Open Source geospatial software community to remember about the cartography – the gist being just because you have the tools to map, doesn’t always mean you jump straight in without thinking about the better picture.
Keynotes by the two top sponsors at the conference – the Ordnance Survey and the Met Office. Both sponsors knew who they were talking to, and pitched the technical level appropriately. At both organisations, the open source ecosystem is pushing in from the sides and slowly becoming a core asset. Both also have large open datasets ready for crunching in your open source GIS of choice.
QGIS 2. This was launched at the conference. I’ve always been a fan of this open source GIS in particular (there are others available, including the venerable GRASS, uDIG etc), in no short part because of its excellent integration with PostGIS, that it works well on the Mac and that it is extendable and drivable with Python. Also, excitingly for the project in the longer time, the developer time and effort has ramped up recently – it’s reassuring to be using an open source application with a large and enthusiastic team beside it. Also – it’s not called Quantum anymore, although it’s going to take me a while to stop accidentally still calling it that.
OpenLayers 3. The first beta of this was also launched at the conference. I have long been a fan on OpenLayers, having regarded it as a richer and more powerful web mapping API than the Google Maps API, and have used its vector styling capabilities extensively. However, it has somewhat had its lunch stolen from it by Leaflet and by Google Maps continuously innovating, so it was due a rewrite – and OpenLayers 3 looks to be that rewrite!
PostGIS/PostgreSQL. There were a number of PostGIS talks, almost all of which were massively oversubscribed – not sure why they were in one of the smallest venues – one even got a representation later! PostGIS is another enormously impressive bit of open source technology, and the rapid-fire demonstration of what was new made me realise I really need to move forward and update my old version! (& do more cool stuff with it.)
The final talk before the closing session was by a tech person at ESRI. He had an awful lot to say in 20 minutes, and consequently overran, but had numerous interesting things to say on JavaScript geo libraries, many of which he lamented hadn’t been covered much (or at all) in the conference – I agree, but the conference did have to pare down nearly 400 submissions to under 200 at the event – such as TopoJSON, Node JS, JS Topology Suite, Shapefile.js, or D3. He did bash QGIS a bit which didn’t go down very well, but to be fair some of the QGIS talks had previously bashed ESRI a lot, which wasn’t called for… Good for ESRI for making the effort to come, even if (or indeed because) QGIS is rapidly becoming a serious competitor.
The conference food – it was excellent.
Catching up with a bunch of people in the community, not just the OSMers – e.g. Rollo (OS), Addy (Edina), Andy, Ben. Andy showed me some new OpenStreetMap renderings which use some advanced cartographic techniques in Mapnik and look great. Mapnik was another topic that I missed from the conference.
Evening tour of Nottingham by SK53 (actually just the leg from the curry house to the Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem, but we went an interesting way.) SK53 has also written up in detail a blog post based in part on a comment I made!
The CASA iPad Wall (which was the other reason I was there) was showing, Ken Burns style, the various submissions to the map competition. In the end, the wall pretty much ran itself, thanks to careful stewardship by the Ordnance Survey who had requested it, and some high quality code that had been written for the display. Interestingly, Wired covered the conference, and focused on the iPad Wall, which really was quite a minor, albeit cool, part of the conference.
Winning a green glass globe paperweight for my submission to the aforementioned competition, namely the global version of my Bike Share Map – “Best Web Map”. This was completely unexpected, indeed I was already on a train back to London, having left just before the announcement, and found out through Twitter. “Singing” legend Gregory is, I hope, keeping careful stewardship of the globe and I will grab it in due course.

There’s a lot I didn’t get to see – Cartopy/Iris, more CartoDB, plus lots of interesting sounding papers presented on the integrated academic track.

This could have been the best conference I’ve ever been to. Ever. Well done to the organising team – I know they worked incredibly hard to deliver, but it was very definitely worth it.

Bike Share Conferences

Tracking, Visualising and Cycling

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 1 October 2013
No Comments on Tracking, Visualising and Cycling

Along with Martin Zaltz Austwick, who blogs as Sociable Physics, I led a workshop session as part of CASA’s annual conference. The topic was “Tracking, Visualising and Cycling” and focused on analysing and mapping bikeshare data. I concentrated on mapping the near-real-time docking station data, while Martin graphed journey data. Both of us used Google Drive as a quick an easy platform to map spatial data and graph it. The techniques that the participants were led through are relatively rudimentary, but hopefully acheived our main purposes of demonstrating the availability of such data and the utility of Google Drive for quick analysis, without leaving anyone on the course behind.

After short presentations by Martin and myself, presenting our recent related output, there were two practical sessions. In the first session, I led participants through downloading the live dock locations/status JSON data files from bikeshare systems in the US, before hacking the JSON into a CSV suitable for upload to Google Drive and showing on a map as a Google Fusion Table. A calculated column was then added to show the empty/full ratio and the docking stations on the maps were coloured appropriately. The result looked a bit like this (if the New York dataset was picked):

A couple of gotchas we ran into: (1) If using Notepad, don’t save the JSON text, as that will “burn in” linebreaks that break it. (2) If you don’t see Google Fusion Tables in your Google Drive apps menu, you need to add it as an app using the button at the bottom of the popup.

Martin then followed by showing participants how to download journey data from the Washington DC “Capital Bikeshare” website, extracting just the data for Saturday 30 June 2012, extracting the number of minutes each journey took in Excel, binning the journeys by minute and then plotting it on a Google Speadsheet chart. An additional section was breaking down the plots by user type – showing a pronounced difference between Subscriber and Casual hires – the latter generally taking much longer for their journeys.

You can view the slides here.

Cycling

Five Pieces of Great Cycling Infrastructure in London

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 26 September 2013
2 Comments on Five Pieces of Great Cycling Infrastructure in London

As part of some recent work visualising and mapping London cycling, I identified five pieces of bike infrastructure in the city that I feel are worthy of highlighting. As is the way with most things related to London cycling, most of these have some controversy attached and here I try and justify why I think they deserved inclusion in my list.

Armadillos, Royal College Street

Royal College Street has long been a flagship cycle facility for Camden Borough, with a wide pavement-based two-way cycle lane being at least 10 years old. However, with some incidents occurring at side-junctions due to motorists not expecting cyclists in both directions, the road has now been reconfigured so that both sides of the street have a cycle lane, and the lane is placed in the road. To stop cars parking in the lane, a mixture of flower planters and “armadillos” are used. Armadillos are compact plastic “bollards” which are small and unobtrusive – so easy to install – which is potentially very significant as a way to quickly increase the number and effectiveness of London’s cycle lanes. The configuration of Royal College Streets ensures the best of both worlds for cyclists – the lane is at road level so pedestrians don’t walk in it, but is separated from the road so motorists don’t park in it. Bus stops don’t interrupt the lane or cause it to swerve behind. The scheme is not perfect – the lanes are not quite wide enough and the route itself stops short of its main junction, and it remains to be seen if cyclists and disembarking passengers can share the same space safely – but still represents an innovative experiment and I hope that armadillos will be marching throughout London soon.

Cycle counter, Goldsmiths’ Row

The south-west to north-east route between Hackney Road and Hackney Central, via Broadway Market and London Fields, has long been popular with cycle commuters. Recently, a further part of the route was closed to vehicles and cyclists instead get the width of the road, rather than the pavement route which was a hazard to people entering the nearby city farm. This counter detects each passing cyclists with metal detectors under the road, and displays the stats on a board for all to see. It’s not perfect (the sensor can double-count or miss from time to time) but generally it shows 1000+ cycles a day, and hit the 100000 mark on 31 August – less than a month after being switched on on 5 August.

Floating towpath, Bow flyover

The Bow flyover junction has long been a physical barrier for cyclists heading up and down the Lea River – and an accident blackspot with two cyclist deaths on the roundabout level recently. This floating towpath was added underneath the roundabout recently, allowing a hassle-free route from Hackney Wick to Poplar and Limehouse. It joins two other “floating towpaths”, one upstream at Lea Bridge/Clapton, and one downstream near Bow Locks/Poplar. The sections are technically floating in that there is water under them, but they are perfectly solid to cycle over, and are subtly lit to allow safe usage at night.

Cycle repair stand, Great Guildford Street

Every had a mechanical while out and about? I have had one many times, and if it’s the evening and the bike shops are not open, then a convoluted tube journey (or worse after 1am) often follows to get home and repatriate the bike or retrieve tools. However if you break down near Bankside, then this handy utility has all the tools you need, attached to wire. The stand itself will also support a bike’s weight while you work on it, and a pump beside (sadly broken at the moment) will help with flat tires. There is another stand in Paddington Station. Both are supplied by Cyclehoop – see also this map of all their public bicycle pumps.

Cycle lanes, Southwark Bridge

These layers are wide, allowing overtaking, and are segregated from both the road and from the pavement. Although they were built because Southwark Bridge was too weak to allow four-lane traffic, the space created represents the safest way to cross a London bridge by bicycle – and with the majority of morning commuter traffic on central London’s bridges being bicycles, it is a much-needed facility. The lane is prominently marked, being one of the better parts of the controversial Barclays Cycle Superhighway network.

To follow in my next post – five that were not in my list, and the reasons why.

Orienteering

London City Race VI: Preview

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 4 September 2013
No Comments on London City Race VI: Preview

The big urban orienteering event on the streets of London, that Brooner and I started back in 2008, is once again fast approaching. Edition 6 takes place on the 22nd of September. A few key differences this year – it’s on a Sunday, it’s in a brand new area for urban orienteering – Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, and there are two starts – accessing the main one involves a spectacular 11 minute elevated journey through the competition area on the famous Docklands Light Railway.

A few things stay the same though – like last year were are producing a limited edition commemorative technical T-shirt (pre-orders now sold out), there is an accompanying race for people making it a London weekend, and finally, there’s going to be a huge turnout – once again well over 1000 people, with almost 250 people coming from overseas. And of course it is organised and marshalled by the event machine that is South London Orienteers.

The map this year is huge – printed on RA3 sheets (slightly bigger than A3) at 1:5000, as for previous years – but this year’s map is back-to-back, with only a small amount of overlap between the two sections. The map was drawn by Remo Madella of Rem Maps, and I have been getting to grips with OCAD recently to make late updates to the map and position courses. Remo was good enough to take some nice “touristic” photos of the terrain as he moved through it, a few of which I have included here.

Right now is the “crunch” stage for organising any big event like this: handing out the last flyers, finalising permissions, making sure that landowners are prepared for the event, drawing up the necessary documentation, booking first aid and photographer, checking trader logistics, thinking about how the event centre will work and look, drafting the final details, feeding entry data into event management systems, designing and ordering race bibs and T-shirts, buying 1000 tickets, checking who has what equipment and if we have enough SI cards, allocating start times, planning the control hanging, worrying that llamas* might eat a control, hoping new construction works don’t suddenly appear, keeping the budget in the black, final tweaking of the course designs, making lots of little line and circle cuttings, checking the tide times, worrying about the weather and preparing the maps to go to the printer.

My “official” role this year is as planner, which means that I design the courses that people run. There are 13 courses this year, with most starting from West India Quay and two junior ones being based in and around the parks on the southern part of the island. I can’t tell you too much about them as orienteers don’t know their course until they pick up the map, except that all sorts of urban terrain will feature prominently on this year’s map, particularly docks and bridges – and to look out for the views across the Thames. A special feature of my favourite course this year (the Men’s Elite) is that its straight line distance is 10km – a UK record length for a purely urban orienteering course? Only in Venice have I run longer urban courses than that, and although the distance is hard on the knees, in a place like Venice – and, I hope, London – it’s difficult to run without a smile on your face!

It’s never easy organising urban orienteering events but the eventual product is always a lot of fun, particularly in a great area that deserves a big race like this. If you haven’t entered yet, entries are open for just a few more days.

* Anything is possible.

Thanks to Remo Medella, the mapper, for these great photos.

Cycling Leisure Munros

Montrose to Mount Keen – Journey to Munro #200

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 2 September 2013
No Comments on Montrose to Mount Keen – Journey to Munro #200

A week up in Scotland, with my road bike, and settled weather, was the ideal chance to pick off some slightly more inaccessible Munros.

Mount Keen is the most easterly of all the Munros, and well isolated from the other multi-Munro ranges around Glensheet and Cairngorm. It’s firmly in the middle of the Angus glens area and 25 miles from the nearest station, Montrose. Ideal for cycling then, particularly as I always wanted to cycle up the 15-mile dead-end road through Glen Esk. The Munro can be climbed from the north or the south – I picked the latter, which starts at Invermark, near the head of the glen.

The cycling section was pleasant, with quiet roads the whole way and a notable 6km section through Edzell Woods that was flat and straight as an arrow, while still being almost free of traffic. Crossing the A96 was daunting but a useful old road fragment makes this easier. The road through Glen Esk climbs steadily, but it’s only 300m in all.

The walking was also straightforward, with undoubtably the best Munroing path I’ve ever been on, probably laid and drained virtually to the summit. This was especially good as, having forgotten to bring my walking boots, I was in my regular road running shoes. I was up and down quickly, covering the 18km distance (with 700m climb) in less than four hours including breaks. Route map.

On the way out, I stopped at the Queen’s Well (top photo), a monument which was laid to commemorate a journey by Queen Victoria over the nearby Mounth Road, an old droving route which is just a track and climbs to 800m. I also visited an old fort which was by the start at Invermark, built high to keep an watchful eye on illegal cattle movements!

The cycle back was pleasant, arriving just as it got dark. I was quiet tired by this stage, so a smoked sausage supper, and Irn Bru, were quickly consumed while I waited for the last train back home. It was 4h40 of cycling, and 90km altogether.

Nice to have got #200 out the way, even if it has taken me 20+ years to get this far now. Only 82 more to do!

Photo gallery

Bike Share Data Graphics Mashups

Analysing “CitiBike” in New York City

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 21 August 2013
No Comments on Analysing “CitiBike” in New York City

The above interactive map compares the popularity of different CitiBike docking stations in New York City, based on the number of journeys that start/end at each dock. The top 100 busiest ones are shown in red, with the top 20 emphasised with pins. Similarly, the 100/20 least popular ones are shown in blue*.

CitiBike is a major bikesharing system that launched in New York City earlier in the summer and has been pulling in an impressive number of rides in its first few weeks – it regularly beats London’s equivalent, whose technology it shares, in terms of daily trip counts, even though London’s system is almost twice as big (compare NYC).

Different areas have different peak times

Here are three maps showing the differences in the popularity of each docking station at different times of the day: left covers the “rush hour” periods (7-10am and 4-7pm), the middle is interpeak (10am-4pm), the domain of tourists, and on the right is evening/night (7pm-7am) – bar-goers going home? The sequence of maps show how the activity of each docking station varies throughout the day, not how popular each docking station is in comparison to the others.

Red pins = very popular, red = significantly more popular than average, green = significantly less popular than average. Binning values are different for each map. Google Maps is being used here. See the larger version.

Some clear patterns above – with the east Brooklyn docks being mainly used in the evenings and overnight, the rush hours highlighting major working areas of Manhattan – Wall Street and Midtown, and interpeak showing a popular “core” running down the middle of Manhattan.

The maps are an output from the stats created by a couple of requests for CitiBike data came through recently – from the New York Times and Business Insider – so it was a good opportunity to get around to something I had been meaning to do for a while – see if I can iterate through the docking station bike count data, spot fluctuations, and infer the number of journeys starting and ending at each docking station.

I was able to relatively quickly put together the Python script to do this fluctuation analysis and so present the results here. I can potentially repeat this analysis for any of the 100+ cities I’m currently visualising collecting data for. Some of these cities (not New York yet) provide journey-level data in batches, which is more accurate as it’s not subject to the issues above, but tends to only appear a few months later, and only around five cities have released such data so far.

Places with persistently empty or full docks differ

Here are two maps highlighting docks that are persistently empty (left) or full (right).

Left map: green = empty <10% of the time, yellow = 10-15%, red = 15-20%, red pins = empty 20%+ of the time. Right map: green = full <2% of the time, yellow = 2-3%, red = 3-4%, red pins = empty 4%+ of the time. Google Maps is being used here. Live version of full map, live version of empty map.

The area near Central Park seems to often end up with empty docking stations, caused perhaps by tourists starting their journeys here, going around Central Park and then downtown. Conversely, Alphabet City, a residential (and not at all touristy) area fairly often has full docking stations – plenty of the bikes for the residents to use to get to work, although not ideal if you are the last one home on a bike.

How the stats were assembled and mapped

As mentioned above, I assembled the stats by looking at the data collected every two minutes, iterating it, and counting changes detected as docking or undocking “events”, while also counting the number of spaces or bikes remaining for the second set of maps.

There are a couple of big flaws to this technique – firstly, if a bike is returned and hired within a single two minute interval (i.e. between measurements) then neither event will be detected, as the total number of bikes in that docking station will have remained constant. This problem mainly affects the busiest docks, and those that see the most variation in incoming/outgoing flows, i.e. near parks and other popular tourist sites. The other issue is that redistribution activities (typically trucks taking bikes from A to B, ideal from full docks to empty docks) are not distinguishable. In large systems, like New York’s, this activity is however a very small proportion of the total activity – maybe less than 5%, and so generally discountable in a rough analysis like this. I detected 1.6 million “events” which equates to 0.8 million journeys which each have a start and end event. The official website is reporting 1.1 million journeys during the same period, suggesting that this technique is able to detect around 64% of journeys.

I’ve used Google Fusion Tables to show the results. Although its “Map” function is somewhat limited, it is dead easy to use – just upload a CSV of results, select the lat/lon columns, create a map, and then set the field to display and which value bins correspond to which pin types. Just a couple of minutes from CSV to interactive map. There are a few other similar efforts out there – which aim to take point-based data and stick it quickly on a map, but Google’s Fusion Tables does the job and is easy to remember.

The data is one month’s worth of journeys – 17 July to 16 August. One note about the popularity map – the data. I am really just scratching at the surface with what can be done with the data. One obvious next step is to break out weekend and weekday activity. There are a few other analysis projects around – this website is analysing the data as it comes in, to an impressive level of detail.

* Any docks added in the last month will probably show as being unpopular at the moment, as it’s an absolute count over the last month, regardless of whether the dock was there or not.