London Bike Flow Animation

Dr Martin Austwick and Ollie O'Brien here in CASA have produced an updated version of the animation of Barclays Cycle Hire bikes on a typical weekday:

Boris Bikes redux from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.

The data for the bikes is courtesy of Transport for London, with the Thames, parks and the underlying network being faithfully drawn by OpenStreetMap contributors.

You can find full details over at Suprageography...

London Cycle Flows: A Sociable Physics Animation

The animation below details the real-time behaviour of hire bikes in London on October 4th 2010, the day of a major tube strike, and the busiest day for the scheme to date.

Departure times and journey durations are real; routing is calculated from OSM data; average speed from journey duration and route length.

London Hire Bikes animation from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.

In the visualisation, the fixed circles represent stands – when a stand flashes red, it means that one or more bikes have left it - and a yellow flash means a bike has arrived. The bikes themselves are represented by the Boris Barclays Blue Tadpoles whizzing around – leaving at the right time, travelling at their correct average speed, and taking a (generally) realistic route.

The movie was created by Martin Austwick of Sociable Physics, here in CASA with the help of Ollie O'Brien (again CASA) for collection and routing.

We are a bit biased on such work, here at digital urban, but its great....