Pan-London London Traffic Flows Map

As an update to the London Cycling Census map that I mentioned in the last post, here is a map based on similar data collected by the Department of Transport during 2012. The map covers the whole of London, over 3000 datapoints – in fact the underlying data is available for the major road network across Great Britain.

My earlier work was based on the Transport for London cycle census which was carried out in April this year, covering around 170 locations in central London only, mainly the major road network plus some cycle-specific routes. The DfT dataset is older, and is major roads only, but by covering the whole of London, it puts cycling (and the other modes of transport covered) in context.

By default, the map shows cyclists vs buses vs lorries. You can change any of the three colours to show cars, but these are generally very large values so the arrows for cars tend to dominate the map. Zooming in may improve clarity when this happens.

Looking across London, for initial set of just bikes, buses and lorries, it is striking to see how closely the lorries follow just the trunk road network. Bicycles also dominate the centre of the city, their levels dropping dramatically between inner and outer London.

The work is an output produced while working on the EUNOIA project. It is one of the datasets that the project will use, when calibrating a MATSim-based travel demand model of London, to check that the numbers in the model roughly match those seen in this dataset.

View the visualisation here.
The data comes from here.