Cartography Update for the Bike Share Visualisation

I’ve refreshed the cartography for my bike share visualisation – the grey background, with dark grey rivers, was looking a bit, well, grey. The rivers are now a nice shade of blue, with the land a bit browner. I’ve also fixed the display of the visualisation on iPhones and iPads (and presumably other portable devices.) It now uses the new “touch gestures” code in the development (unreleased) version of OpenLayers, allowing people to pinch, zoom and pan with their fingers. I’ve also done a general tidy of how the information is displayed, at the top and the bottom of the screen, taking out some of the clutter and highlighting the key numbers more prominently. The animated version has also had a spring clean.

Finally, I’ve added in San Antonio, Chicago and Des Moines bike shares. These are all quite small schemes, but they use B-Cycle technology, which means pulling in their data was very easy to do – it’s exactly the same as for Denver, which I already had.

There is also a small change in the statistics – the “max today” stat is now based on the local time for the bike share, not London time.

Next on the to-do list is to add the current weather, and display the time in the local time zone, rather than the time on your computer. Also I look forward to seeing the data from Torontoand Ottawa in Canada and Boulder in Colorado, US. Both schemes are launching in the next month and look to be quite large so will provide a good insight into the movement of the respective cities. Watch out Europe, America is catching up and with systems that provide excellent data (Bixi and B-Cycle) they’ll overtake you!