The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Many of London’s tube stations act as a focal point for the community they serve, and some times even give end up giving the area it’s name (Angel and Northwood Hills being two examples – one named after a pub/tea-house and one the winning entry in a competition). But some are just wrong and need […]
Continue reading »Following on from its crossing of the Grand Union Canal this spring, the huge viaduct is finally built. The giant red “launching girder” which spent a couple of years crawling across the Colne Valley building the viaduct below itself, lies in pieces at the end of its journey, being packed up into shipping containers ready […]
Continue reading »A quick visit to the Grand Union Canal between Harefield and Denham, at the point where the Colne Valley Viaduct, part of the HS2 railway, crosses it. The construction of the two-mile-long viaduct has been creeping towards the canal for the last two years, and new the red construction girder has slid across the canal […]
Continue reading »Back in 2018, I did a London Borough Challenge – visit all 32 London Boroughs, plus the City of London, in as short a time as possible. I made things hard for myself, by taking a photograph, within each borough and of the name of the borough (e.g. street signs, salt-bins, libraries etc). I didn’t […]
Continue reading »Yes, we did it again. All the Docks 2 took place in London on 9 July. Five teams (up from three last time) each cycled between a fifth of the Santander Cycles docking stations in London. I again did the routes, splitting up the ~800 docking stations into 5 routes of 160 docking stations apiece. […]
Continue reading »Seven years ago, I wrote “We don’t have individual building age open data in the UK” – but that is no longer true! The MLUHC (for England Wales) and the Scottish Government via the Energy Saving Trust have been publishing individual Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), for both residential and non-residential buildings, for several years now, […]
Continue reading »In an effort to focus my (now rather limited as parent of two young children) spare time on a more nuanced set of web projects, I have consolidated some websites. Three Blogs into One I have combined two other blogs into this one: I still another blog – Mapping London – which will stay separate […]
Continue reading »One challenge I have been dealing with recently is moving many old web applications off an old (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) self-managed server onto a new, centrally managed one. The project has been necessitated by needing to move our physical servers into a properly managed data university centre (with more reliable power, and freeing up server […]
Continue reading »At the end of each year (normally between Christmas and New Year), there’s a lot to tidyup across Bike Share Map (BSM), the Meddin Bike-Sharing World Map (BSWM) and the UK Shared Micromobility Dashboard. This year, I’m aiming to document all the changes needed, roughly around the time that I make the changes. Monday:
Continue reading »Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and […]
Continue reading »Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and […]
Continue reading »Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and […]
Continue reading »On Monday I spent a lot of time (over 13 hours) cycling between 268 docking stations in London. It was for the All the Docks challenge, as part of Team East, with Joe (Be.EV CCO, and ex-ofo) and Jeyda (fettle CEO). There was also an all-stars Team West and Team South (including Voi, TIER, Zwings, […]
Continue reading »On Monday I will be attempting to visit every Santander Cycles docking station in east London by bike, starting at 9am outside the velodrome in the Lea Valley VeloPark (the famous one from the London 2012 Olympics), cycling over 70 miles and hopefully finishing sometime that evening close to the London Transport Museum in the […]
Continue reading »You may be wondering why it’s been so quiet on Bikesharp, the last couple of years… well the reason is that I have been a data journalist on this topic for Zag Daily, an online magazine focusing on shared electric micromobility, particularly in Europe and especially in the UK. So I’ve been writing about the […]
Continue reading »It’s just over one year since I last had a detailed look at the worksite for the forthcoming Colne Valley Viaduct, and I was back last week to see what’s changed. Launch Girder The viaduct is being built north to south, and this striking red structure, the launch girder, has just been assembled on the […]
Continue reading »I’ve been based at the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre, a multi-university (UCL/Liverpool/Leeds/Oxford) lab focused on research and provision of specialist UK consumer datasets, since 2015. One of my first outputs was to adapt DataShine, which I’d created in 2013 as part of a previous UCL project, to produce CDRC Maps – to map some […]
Continue reading »High Speed 2 (HS2) will leave London by curving away from the Chiltern Main Line, across the Colne Valley on what will the the UK’s longest railway viaduct. It crosses the Greater London boundary before briefly coming back to ground level and then on into the Chiltern Hills in a long tunnel. The place between […]
Continue reading »In the first post in a mini-series, I looked at how High Speed 2 is impacting West Ruislip and Ickenham. In this second piece, I move slightly west, to look at the Colne Valley Viaduct. At 2.2 miles long, this will be one of the biggest structures on the entire line. The viaduct is what […]
Continue reading »Recently I become part of the editorial team at the Bike-Sharing World Map (this is a new version, not yet launched) which is the world’s only comprehensive map of bikeshare systems, listing the approximately 2000 active systems along with another 1000 that are either in planning or already closed. The Bike-Sharing World Map was compiled […]
Continue reading »There’s a new bikeshare in London – HumanForest launched yesterday (Wednesday 24 June 2020) with 63 pedelec bicycles. They are planning on rolling out up to 200 bicycles in their Islington trial operation, before hopefully expanding to central London later this summer with up to 1000 in their fleet. HumanForest’s technology platform and equipment provider […]
Continue reading »I earlier this week spoke at a Cycling@Tea-Time seminar, on the impact of lockdown on bikeshare, looking at London, the UK, and the world in general. The talk was based on some very preliminary crunching through some CDRC datasets to see how usage has changed, both in volume and time-of-day, for how people are using […]
Continue reading »Trust for London (TFL), a charity and themselves a major funder of charitable projects in London to address poverty and inequality, has this week launched the London Poverty Profile (LPP) 2020. There is an updated data-driven website with over 100 different indicators of poverty and inequality, compiled by WPI Economics, along with a PDF report […]
Continue reading »I was invited by organiser Landor LINKS to the Walking and Cycling Conference which took place in Manchester last month. The conference included a good focus on bikeshare, and it was a good time for the UK-focused bikeshare industry to pause and take stock of a busy 2019. Three UK-focused bikeshare operators – Freebike, Beryl … Continue reading Walking & Cycling Innovations →
Continue reading »A bylaw is being drafted between the 32 London borough councils (and the City of London) to introduce a coordinated approach to managing dockless micromobility sharing, such as bikeshare and (should future national legislation permit it) escootershare, across London. Currently, each council sets its own policy with regards to dockless cycle operators in their area, … Continue reading Consolidating Dockless Cycles in London →
Continue reading »When running a fleet of dockless bikeshare bikes, one of the potentially most costly problems is theft of the bicycles. They aren’t attached to anything if they are dockless, even if they are in a marked “hub”, and, even if the bikes are typically heavier than a personal bike, they can still be easy targets … Continue reading Use vs Theft: Risks and Rewards for Dockless Bike Operations in London →
Continue reading »Mobility is a complex and important topic in geography, planning and technology. My research only touches on a small part of the field, namely automated micromobility services (aka micro-MaaS?) such as bikeshare and escootershare, so it’s always interesting to see a wider viewpoint. As such, I was interested when an acquaintance at HERE Mobility, an … Continue reading The State of Mobility: MaaS Consolidation on the Horizon? →
Continue reading »Last week I was at FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geo) 2019 conference, in Bucharest, Romania. It was the second time I had attended the global conference, the first being back in 2013 in Nottingham. There are also country and region “mini” versions of the conference, including FOSS4G UK which I have also … Continue reading FOSS4G 2019 →
Continue reading »Two bicycle sharing systems have launched in London in the last fortnight, joining four systems already on the streets of central London and two more on the edge of the capital: Freebike launched a system based in the City, Islington, Hackney, Camden, Kensington, Chelsea and parts of Lambeth and Wandsworth along the river. Essentially, central … Continue reading Then There Were Eight →
Continue reading »This map shows how different parts of London have over/underperformed with respect to the capital as a whole, with a 1995 baseline. Green areas have increased in price by more than the London median, while pink areas have underperformed, increasing by a smaller percentage from their 1995 baseline price, compared with the rest of London. … Continue reading House Price Performance Variations in London Over 23 Years →
Continue reading »I wrote about a new dataset from the ONS, HPSSA (House Prices for Small Statistical Areas), a few years ago. The dataset has continued to be updated quarterly, and more recently, ONS started publishing the data at a more fine-grained spatial resolution, namely LSOAs (Lower Super Output Areas). LSOAs typically each contain a population of … Continue reading House Prices →
Continue reading »JUMP, Uber’s electric-assist dockless bikeshare, arrives in London today, with a 350-bike trial in Islington borough. The organisation is also looking to expand to other London boroughs later this summer. We’ve had quite a few dockless bikeshare operations trying to crack the London market, with its huge potential, but fragmented cooperation/approval process split between 33 … Continue reading JUMP Leaps Into London – Now It Gets Interesting →
Continue reading »The Guardian newspaper has published an online article about the rise and fall of dockless bikeshare, focusing on the pure dockless systems in England (there aren’t any in the rest of the UK) that grew in 2017, and then shrank last autumn. The article extensively used some of the geospatial boundary data that I have … Continue reading Dockless Bikeshare in London: Part 2 →
Continue reading »A puncture on my own bicycle on my way in to work this morning found me grinding to a halt outside Manor House station – not the worst place to have a flat tyre, as the tube from there will take me into work in around 20 minutes with just one change, for £2.40. (The … Continue reading Lime-E Bikeshare: London Test →
Continue reading »I was a guest earlier this week at HERE Techologies at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019 in Las Vegas, the world’s biggest consumer electronics trade show. Their booth was directly right outside the main entrance to the Convention Centre, the hub of CES, right beside Google’s own huge one. The juxtaposition was interesting, the … Continue reading A Day with HERE at CES →
Continue reading »I was in Paris just before Christmas, taking part in a workshop at IFSSTAR (Université Paris-Est) on innovations in flow visualisation – GFlowiz. I talked/demonstrated some old and new ways that I and others have shown commute journeys in the UK on the web, looking both at The Great British Bike to Work and TubeCreature … Continue reading A Glimpse of the Future in Paris →
Continue reading »I’ve been keeping an eye on London’s population projections, and indeed have featured them in a couple of presentations recently – at a TedX event and also a CRUK data visualisation conference at The Crick. By taking the most recent mid-year population estimates for London, and the annual population change, I can simply linearly extrapolate … Continue reading London’s 9 Million Day – Delayed →
Continue reading »I recently presented at the CoMoUK Good Mobility Conference in East London, looking at the story of bikeshare in London over the last 12 months ago, touching a little on other systems in the UK. Here are my slides, slightly updated from the conference itself: While the core of the presentation was a timeline, numbers … Continue reading Bikeshare in London – The Last 12 Months →
Continue reading »Having travelled to both Milan and Singapore in the last few weeks, it’s worth a note on the bikeshare provisions there. Milan has BikeMi, a long-serving dock-based bikeshare system, which is one of the nearly 400 city systems that I have mapped in Bike Share map. It covers a big part of the city. There … Continue reading Bikeshare Snapshot – Milan and Singapore →
Continue reading »Dockless bikeshare has been out in London for around 10 months now (not withstanding the brief but spectacular oBike launch and burnout in mid 2016). It looks like the operators are getting serious and trying to get dockless bikeshare to pay for itself – starting a transition from a “growth” to “profit” focus: Mobike has … Continue reading Making Bikeshare Pay →
Continue reading »