Jo Wood, a professor of visual analytics, visualized five million bike rides using data from Barclays Cycle Hire.
In the animation (see below) the least travelled routes begin to fade out after about 15 seconds – “like a graphic equaliser,” says collaborator Andrew Huddart, also at City University. Around the 1-minute mark, structure emerges from the chaos and three major systems become clear: routes around, and through, the lozenge-shaped Hyde Park in the west, and commutes in and out of King’s Cross St Pancras in the north and between Waterloo and the City in the east.
Each arc represents a trip from point A to point B (obviously not a true path or we’d see roads), and flow direction indicates which way people went the most between the two. [via The Guardian]
Very cool – and as you point out, it’d be great to see this kind of viz with GPS track data as the underlying source vs. just the route endpoints. We’re gathering this data at SufferHub with an eye on being able to analyze routes cyclists take; being able to identify highest-traffic cycling commute routes could be useful for city planners, and for recreational cyclists it’d be interesting to find the “best” (most popular) routes to ride on in a given area. Time to reach out to the professors at City University! :)