Category: London

Don’t Zone-1 It When You Can Boris Bike It

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 6 December 2011
15 Comments on Don’t Zone-1 It When You Can Boris Bike It

[Updated with new connections.] Ever thought what the tube network would look like if you took out the expensive Zone 1? Me neither, until this morning, when I was wondering if it was possible to utilise my current “Boris Bike” bikeshare 24-hour membership to save a bit of money on commuting in to work.

Transport for London would really rather you didn’t take the tube into Zone 1. It’s often at capacity during the rush hour. The fares are priced accordingly – for example, to get a tube from Zone 3 to Zone 1, it costs £2.90 during the Peak Fare periods, compared with £1.40 if you only go from Zone 3 to Zone 2. Do that commute twice, and it’s a £3 saving missing out Zone 1, which more than makes up for the £1 Boris Bike 24-hour membership charge. So, I was wondering if it is viable to get off the tube a few stops early and Boris Bike the final mile or so.

Superimposing my London bike share map reveals directions from where such money-saving journeys may be possible. Plenty of opportunities from the north-west or the west, with St John’s Wood, Notting Hill and Earls Court having easy Boris Bike accessibility. Access from the south-west and south is also good, thanks to Vauxhall and Elephant & Castle. Things get a little trickier – as usual – in the south-east, where a 1km walk from Bermondsey, or a much longer walk from South Bermondsey are your only options – the region won’t even stand to benefit from the forthcoming scheme expansion. The east is also an option, with Whitechapel being very well stocked with Boris Bikes, and Wapping not being too far either. The east is set to benefit too from the imminent expansion of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, to use its full name, to cover all of Tower Hamlets. The north-east is OK, with Hoxton an option, although it’s a shame the docks don’t extend up to Highbury & Islington station, a major interchange. The north is also good, thanks to the legendary Mornington Crescent station.

Four of the Best Zone 2 & Bike Opportunities

Mornington Crescent (Northern Line) – right beside a big docking station. Don’t go to Euston (Zone 1). It’s also easy to get to Mornington Crescent from the Overground, thanks to an unmarked but official Out of Station Interchange.
Notting Hill Gate (Central Line) – the tube takes you to the top of the hill, then go east by Boris Bike.
Earl’s Court (District/Piccadilly) – it’s a long way to Charing Cross, but if you don’t need to go that far, the bike is a good way to travel.
Whitechapel (District/Hammersmith & City) – two big stands very close to the station, and an easy cycle along CS2 into the City.

So, all in all, not too bad. Whether it’s worth the extra time walking to a convenient docking station, and the worry of finding it all out of bikes, to save a pound or two, is another thing…

See my Mapping London article for more detail about the No Zone 1 map. You can click on the map above for a larger version. An SVG version (i.e. editable) without the bike docking stations, is downloadable here although there is lots of missing detail beyond Zone 2.

The map was based on a Wikimedia/Wikipedia file, which I then augmented (to show the Overground and some selected regular railway lines) with OpenStreetMap data, by producing a map in GEMMA of railway=rail features. I also added some unmarked Out of Station Interchanges, thanks to this FOI request. Photos by Gnatallica, Clotheyes and Wwarby on Flickr.

[Update: An earlier version of the article and map made reference to Shoreditch High Street station which I incorrectly thought was in Zone 2 for “old East London Line” journeys – it appears this is not actually the case – the anomaly that I was misremembering is that for short journeys from the station, the Peak Fare increases do not apply. I’ve also updated the map a few times since posting this article, to add in a few missing stations and also the locations of the big terminus stations in London. I’ve also added some “Out of Station Interchanges” on the Overground – many of these aren’t marked on official TfL maps, but are valid interchanges, i.e. you don’t get charged for two journeys.]

Conferences London

Magical Maps: An Evening at the Art of Mapping Exhibition

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 18 November 2011
2 Comments on Magical Maps: An Evening at the Art of Mapping Exhibition

I was at a talk last night organised by the Londonist – Magical Maps. It took place in the TAG Fine Arts‘ Air Gallery in Mayfair. TAG Fine Arts currently have an exhibition there – The Art of Mapping, and the audience was surrounded by the various artworks – some made from maps, some as interpretations of maps and some simply with a geographical theme.

The speakers were Stephen Walter, an artist who drew the “Island” London map that was a hit at the British Library’s recent Magnificent Maps exhibition; John Kennedy, a London cabbie, blogger and chronologer of bollards and other London objects; and UCL CASA’s very own James Cheshire, recent PhD, now lecturer.

James was up first and showed some of the recent visualisation work by CASA. You can see most of what he showed in an article here.

Then John explained The Knowledge, taking the audience on a verbal taxi journey, from the gallery to the Elephant and Castle – “the true centre of London” – and back, taking into account various banned turns and other taxi restrictions! His journey was peppered with anecdotes of the various places encountered.

Finally, Stephen outlined his artistic career, showing how he switched from traditional photography and painting, to producing the monochromatic repeated symbols on landscapes, that envolved into maps and finally his famous Island map. He also showed some works in progress, such as a map of London’s underground structures (tube lines, water pipes, the Mail Rail etc).

Matt from the Londonist then chaired a Q&A session with the panel, and finally there was another chance to look around and think about the artworks on the walls. I was most intrigued by the below image, which lists and shows all the bridges across the Thames in London, the top line being Teddington Lock and the bottom being the Thames Barrier – but I don’t know why the lines cross over and wiggle. Perhaps it is just purely artistic, but the data visualiser in me hopes there is a deeper meaning and an embedded infographic…

An excellent evening with three very different but equally engaging speakers and some very interesting things to look at.

The exhibition is open for another week, it’s quite small and free, and there is a complementary exhibition book, so take a visit to Mayfair and have a look! There is a talk tomorrow by some of the artists.

London Mashups

The Tech City Map

Last week the government launched the Tech City map. It is not the first – there have been several previous maps, e.g. by the Guardian, of technology startups in the Old Street/Shoreditch area of London, but this is the highest profile one produced yet. I’m not sure whether a map itself is useful to the community but it serves perhaps to increase the identity and branding of the area – and awareness of it for the general public.

Incidentally, the area covered is also known as the Silicon Roundabout area, it often incorrectly referred to the Westminster set as “East London” (I would more term it as North-East inner-city London). I would consider more for the area around the Olympic Park to be true East London, i.e. east of Charing Cross, north of the river and east of the City – areas such as the East End, Stratford, Barking and West Ham.

As for the cartography, there has been some criticism by some people of the mass of straight blue lines, representing retweets of one company’s message by others. I prefer to see it as a piece of “art” showing the interconnectiveness of the organisations. No one’s trying to do serious quantitative impact work with this, it’s just for visual impact and identification of a new organically-created geographical area.

It’s nice also that the custom style functionality of Google Maps v3 API is being used – giving the streets a nice blue hue rather than the very familiar (and quite distracting) regular colours on Google Maps. Of course Google has recently introduced quite low limits (2500 map loads) for free usage of its custom style functionality, I wonder if this website eventually breaching such a limit if it gets hit with another blaze of publicity?

Perhaps the most exciting news that came out of last week’s announcements was that UCL, Imperial and Cisco are collaborating to build a new Future Cities research facility in the Tech City area, which would be focusing on urban modelling and technology. This is music to my ears – I’m not sure whether UCL CASA, the lab where I work, has plans ever have a presence there but it would be an amazing place to work. Maybe there will be a CASA East in the not too distant future?

London OpenStreetMap

Someone’s Mouse Slipped

…when they were plotting this road in East London for Google Maps:

A quick look at the Google Maps aerial imagery confirms there’s something odd about that road kink:

Never fear, OSM is here:

London

A Topologically Correct, Geographically Insane Tube Map

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 1 September 2011
No Comments on A Topologically Correct, Geographically Insane Tube Map

I’m a sucker for alternative maps of the London Underground, and here’s a great one – the Twisted London Underground Map by Francisco Dans (see the original in high-resolution on Flickr) – it’s perhaps not going to be useful to navigate by, but is a great bit of art.

A recent trend of alternative maps is to show geographically accurate ones, that inevitably end up crumpling the dense centre of the network and leave huge gaps on the edges. This is a map does the opposite – it has taken the geographical deformity of the underground network map to its (il)logical extreme. The real map has never pretended to correspond to the actual locations of the stations on the surface, placing stations in roughly correct locations, but only relative to each other and not the map as a whole. This does away with that rule too. But importantly, it is a topologically accurate map – the official connections are shown correctly. Everything else is curves of various radii – only the Underground logo and the station connectors are straight lines.

Francisco writes on his posting that he is looking to add in the DLR and Overground lines to a future iteration, plus fix a couple of bugs with the existing map that eagle-eyed observers have spotted. Hopefully the Thames will go in too, it’s the one non-tube feature that everyone loves. I wonder what that will end up looking like?

Thanks to Francisco for permission to reproduce the map and to IanVisits on Twitter for the heads-up. Cross-posted from the Mapping London blog.

London

London Riots Maps

James Cridland has created and is updating a map of verified reports of looting and rioting in London – and elsewhere.

I much prefer this to another map which is automatically updated from postcoded tweets (similar to the UK Snow map) as Twitter is as much a source of disinformation as information, particularly for emotive subjects like this (false rumours propagate just as quickly as true news) and also information that is not relevant – the cluster around Tottenham for example is by-and-large relating to offers of assistance rather than reports of trouble.

I’ve combined James’ data (as at 3pm today) in KML form, with a choropleth map from the London Profiler showing London-only deciles of the 2004 Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), and overlaid both on an OpenStreetMap map, using MapTube. You can see this here. Please note I’m not suggesting there is any correlation or causality between the IMD and the locations of the disturbances.

The riots have affected me slightly, in-so-far as it is difficult to find any supermarkets in north/east Zone 2 (i.e. inner-city London) open in the evenings, and I’m taking a long way round to home, via Tower Hamlets rather than Hackney, to avoid a couple of flashpoints on the way (and going home during daylight hours.)

Data Graphics London

Sense and the City

The Sense and the City exhibition at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden opens today, and runs until March next year. It includes a number of transport visualisations contributed by the team at UCL CASA, including a themed version of my own Bike Share Map, and a similar animation I’ve done for Oyster card tap ins/outs, and also Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick’s bike movement animation. I was along with Martin (pictured above and below!) and some of the others in the team, for the private view on Wednesday.

The exhibition is in three main sections – downstairs there are a number of big screens, showing the aforementioned animations. The area is quite dark, so the graphics have come out really well. The second section is up a spiral staircase (easy to miss) where a number of touch-screen computers show more visualisations from CASA and others, each selectable by the user. The system that runs this will allow us to update the animations during the course of the exhibition, so if we do some newer related work, you may well see it here! Behind this is the last section, which is more conceptual, with a number of “visions of the future from the past” magazine covers, and other bits of futuristic transport technology – a Sinclair C5 and a “Ryno” one-wheeled motorbike. Sadly a Barclays Cycle Hire bike is not there in the flesh, but you don’t have to walk far from Covent Garden to run into them in real life. Finally, just outside the exhibition area is a “smart” bus-stop. You have to look carefully to spot the video camera, which apparently detects how much interest people are taking in the advertising panel, and adjusts its advertising appropriately.

Of course, being the transport museum, all the regular tube trains and buses are still there. The “New Bus for London” mockup is there, as is a classic Routemaster, and it would have been rude not to have gone for a ride…

Below – the Oyster card animation and Steven Gray’s Tweet-o-Meters.

London

Tweets in London

From the Mapping London blog:

Many Twitter messages, or “tweets”, are sent with latitude/longitude information, allowing an insight into the places where the most amount of tweeting happens. For a magazine article, I produced the above map of London, with help from a colleague Steven Gray, who collected the data across several weeks using some technologies he has developed. It is a heatmap of sorts, with particular locations where the level of tweets are very high. The data is collected in a 30km radius around central London.

London’s city centre stands out, as would be expected, as well as a distinctive streak of tweets heading directly north – an arm of London where the typical Twitter demographic – young and connected – makes up a particularly high proportion of people living there. Other features – such as along a road in the North West that suffered severe roadworks during the collection period, the A13/Eurostar travel line running along estuarine Essex, and the runways of Heathrow Airport, also appear. It’s also interesting to see how large parts of surburban London are “empty” of tweets.

Further detail on Steven’s Big Data Toolkit blog.

The map contains data which is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap and contributors (the River Thames) and which is Crown Copyright Ordnance Survey (OpenData) 2011.

Bike Share London

Dock Monitor – Keeping an Eye on Boris Bike Docks

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 26 April 2011
1 Comment on Dock Monitor – Keeping an Eye on Boris Bike Docks

Transport for London have gradually been adding docking stations to the Barclays Cycle Hire network in central London – and occasionally they remove, rename or relocate the existing ones. TfL do now have a webpage which is manually updated with docking station news, but there’s no good way to spot when a new docking station might have appeared in your neighbourhood – without coming across it accidently or waiting for the official page to be updated, so I’ve created Dock Monitor. It’s a blog that is automatically updated as soon as new docking stations appear, or changes happen to the existing ones. Every hour, a script downloads the latest list of stations from the official map, compares with its existing list, and then submits new blog posts as appropriate.

Changes happen surprisingly often. Docks often shrink in size to 0 as they are temporarily operated on (rather than disappearing from the map or having their status changed to not installed.) New docks are sometimes put in with the wrong name or location, these normally get corrected soon after. To try and cut down on the noise, I only post about size changes where more than 20 docking points in the dock are affected, and docks have to have been missing for more than 48 hours before I announce these. TfL has also been changing the IDs associated with some of the docks – which is not something that impacts people using the system, but is a big headache for third-party developers who were hoping that TfL’s IDs were going to be canonical. Looks like I’ll need to create my own set of IDs… Anyway Dock Monitor should spot this too.

Because the blog posts are automatically made, then a data error at source may course a massive burst of blog posts to appear. If this does happen, I’ll try and manually clean up the blog once I notice it.

You can see Dock Monitor here (or subscribe to the RSS feed). You can also view just newly added docks, or the corresponding feed.