Using Oyster Card journeys to understand how, why and where we travel in London

Researchers from UCL have analysed millions of Oyster Card journeys in a bid to understand how, why and where we travel in London.

Professor Michael Batty (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Soong Kang (UCL Management Science and Innovation) applied the techniques of statistical physics to their mountain of raw data.

The pair joined forces with a computational social scientist and a physicist, both based in Paris, to explore patterns of commuting by tube into central London:

They used Transport for London’s database of 11 million records taken over one week from the Oyster Card electronic ticketing system.