Category: Data Graphics

I was intrigued by this tweet that appeared in my Twitter client this morning:

It’s one of those tweets that makes you go “That doesn’t sound right?”

Is Tokyo really a third of the size of England? It generally takes just under four hours by highish-speed train from London to the edge of England (Berwick) and a similar amount of time to get down to Cornwall. Even Wales is a good couple of hours away. I know they have ultra-fast trains in Japan but can Tokyo really be that big?

The link offers up the following map as proof, which appears to be based on Google Earth (very likely Copyright Google and its aerial imagery partners):

Some of the comments on the source article mention the key point that the Toyko metropolitan area, an administrative area, contains a large amount of rural land. The same is somewhat true of London – parts of the south-eastern fringe of the Greater London Authority (GLA) area are very definitely rural, and conversely built-up areas (Loughton) are outside of the GLA but part of the London continuous urban area and very much feel part of London – e.g. it’s on the tube network and in Zone 6.

Another example of administrative areas not coinciding with urban areas is that the City of Edinburgh council area extends well away from the city – but only to the west (i.e. to the Forth Bridge). In all other directions, the boundary is not far from the city bypass which is itself not far from the urban area, or there’s water in the way.

So a better comparison would be to visually compare the built-up areas of the two cities, first of all making sure that the scales are exactly the same and that the projections are appropriate for each city – I’m not saying this is not the case for the Google Earth example, although you do have to be careful with how Google Earth displays scales for, and projects, very large areas, as they are not always 100% rigorous.

I asked James of Spatial Analysis to have a quick look, as he had the data to hand, and he’s produced the rather lovely map which is at the top of this article. Thanks James! The dark grey areas are built-up areas and railways and the land and sea are also shown for context. A rough visual comparison of the map shows the urban area of Tokyo is maybe 3 times the size of London. This kind of equates to the population difference (8.5 million vs 31 million, using very rough numbers) and shows that Tokyo would fit quite snugly into Kent, rather than taking up much of southern England as the original statement implied – its own map, while exaggerating the urban area, also doesn’t quite cover a third of the nation.

(As an aside – it’s tricky to define exactly what a metropolitan area is – Wikipedia’s article for instance has very different numbers.)

So Tokyo is big – yes – but not nation-eating gigantic. I could probably just about cope with it.

One thing I noticed in Vienna, and passing through Brussels airport on the way home, was a number of “augmented reality” advertising displays, ones that detect people in front of them and then show that on their screens. In all the following, Steve Gray of CASA was the subject being visualised.

Here was the first I saw, at Wien Mitte S-Bahn station, where a special “performance” box was taped out on the platform alongside:

Then, at Vienna Aiport, they had a screen above part of a walkway, which augmented various “forest” animals with passersby. Rabbits and deer would appear, grazing on the “grass” when no one was passing. As people approached, the animals would disappear back into the undergrowth. Passing people on the screen left virtual “leaf trails”, while butterflies would occassionally land on their shoulders. Unfortunately my camera didn’t take a great picture, although you can see a butterfly on someone’s hair and some leaf trails here:

On changing through Brussels, a “heat scanner” showed passing people. This was beside a travelator, so your moment of fame was brief:

Vienna itself currently has a aural art installation from the Royal College of Arts. On walking through the Meccano-like sculpture, detectors would sense you and a nearby speaker would start playing a musical sound. Each detector had a different sound type, but they worked in harmony to produce a kind of song, changing as you and other people moved around:

Sadly, on our arrival into Heathrow, we were back to the regular non-augmented ad experience.

As a followup to my previous post about the (re-)discovery of the iPhone locations cache, the graphic above shows the apparent locations (of known mobile-phone masts and wifi) that were captured on my iPhone, over the last couple of weeks while I have been in Scotland. These were either independently detected by my iPhone and georeferenced using a built-in service, or, more likely as it turns out, the details of supposed nearby masts were downloaded by my iPhone from this service, based on its own location, in the hope they would subsequently be detected and allow for quick positioning.

The graphic is from my hacked version of iPhoneLocator, changed to show a higher density of dots and include the wifi data. I have superimposed on the map red lines showing where I’ve actually gone over the break. Some of the detected (or downloaded in the hope of detection) mobile-phone masts were over 40 miles away from where I actually was. Some of these may have been when I was on top of a Munro (i.e. over 3000 feet up) which therefore affords a good line of sight. Or simply, there were so few in the area, that details from the far-away ones were the best available to be obtained.

If I hadn’t drawn the red lines, you would probably be surprised to discover, for example, that I never went to Inverness during this trip (the big patch of yellow circles in the very top part of the map extract. I also never went along the various roads visible in the north, west or east part of the map, but my phone still saw the towers in these locations. So to conclude, take the detected locations with a pinch of salt. They tell you where an external database thinks a cell-phone tower once was, or where the nearest few are, even if they are a long way away. They certainly don’t tell you where you’ve actually been…

Dmitry Adamskiy has built a map of the prices of “advance-purchase” train tickets to anywhere in Great Britain, from several key locations, e.g. London, Birmingham, Liverpool. The dots on the map are colour coded from green to red depending on how cheap or expensive the fares are.

Some striking patterns appear, looking at, for instance the London departure map (shown above). The capital is surrounded by a belt of high ticket prices – the commuter belt – with cheaper tickets generally beyond. The line to King’s Lynn is expensive all the way – but the rest of East Anglia is much cheaper. Birmingham, the south coast and the west coast of Wales are also notable cheap areas. One of the Welsh Valley lines stands out as being much more expensive than the others.

Some other distinctive trends are obvious when departing from Brighton (shown below) – which is only an hour away from London. Suddenly, the eastern half of the country is consistently more expensive to visit than the west. It’s very cheap to get into London on the Southern Railway services, but expensive to visit other parts of the capital, away from the centre. Birmingham and Bristol are quite a bit cheaper cheaper than most of London.

The map can be viewed here. Click on a dot to see the station name and ticket price. There are some notes here.

The background mapping is based on OpenStreetMap. I’m not sure from where Dimitry has obtained his pricing information or station location information from.