The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 »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 »I attended and presented at the FOSS4G UK conference in central London, in early March. I was scheduled to present in the cartography track, near the end of the conference, and it ended up being an excellent session, the other speakers being Charley Glynn, digital cartographer extraordinaire from the Ordnance Survey, who talked on “The … Continue reading FOSS4G UK 2018 Meeting and OpenLayers 4 →
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The ORR publishes station entry/exit numbers on an annual basis, on a “best guess” basis, using ticket sales, gate information and modelling. The data is split by ticket type – full fare, reduced fare (off-peak tickets, tickets bought with railcards, advance tickets, child tickets etc) and season tickets. They make this data available as an … Continue reading Railway Station Numbers →
Continue reading »As part of a presentation I gave yesterday at the RSAI-BIS (Regional Science Association International – British & Irish Section) annual conference on DataShine Travel to Work maps, I outlined the following eight techniques to avoid swamping origin/destination (aka flow) maps with masses of data, typically shown as straight lines between each pair of locations. … Continue reading Eight Ways to Better Flow Maps →
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My latest London data visualisation crunches an interesting dataset from the Department of Transport. The data is available across England, although I’ve chosen London in particular because of its more interesting (i.e. not just car dominated) traffic mix. I’ve also focused on just the data for 8am to 9am, to examine the height of the … Continue reading Evolution of London’s Rush Hour Traffic Mix →
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I’ve produced an updated version of a graphic that my colleague Dr James Cheshire created a few years ago, showing how the estimated life expectancy at birth various throughout the capital, using a geographical tube map to illustrate the sometimes short-distance changes. You can see an interactive version on my tube data visualisation platform. Click … Continue reading Lives on the Line v2: Estimated Life Expectancy by Small Areas →
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The Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) at UCL is organising a short pop-up exhibition on hyperlocal data: Big Data Here. The exhibition is taking place in North Lodge, the small building right beside UCL’s main entrance. The exhibition materials are supplied by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). Inside, a big projection shows local … Continue reading Big Data Here →
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Like its English counterpart IMD, SIMD is released every few years by the Scottish government, as a dataset which scores and ranks every small statistical area in Scotland according to a number of measures. These are then combined to form an overall rank and measure of deprivation for the area. This can then be mapped … Continue reading SIMD 2016: The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation →
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TubeHeartbeat is a interactive map that I recently built as part of a commission by HERE, using the HERE JavaScript API. It visualises a fascinating dataset that TfL makes available sporadically – the RODS (Rolling Origin Destination Survey) – which reveals the movements of people on the London Underground network in amazing detail. The data … Continue reading TubeHeartbeat →
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There was a time when Google Maps was an ugly ducking. It started life as a road map, and its grey background was decryed at a memorable keynote at the British Cartographic Society annual conference 8 years, contrasting with the classic Ordnance Survey Landranger maps where the spaces between roads were normally full of “something” … Continue reading Putting Cartography Back on the Map – Google Maps Getting Prettier →
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A startup with a billion dollar asset. This is how HERE’s new CEO Edzard Overbeek describes the location services company that is making a striking pitch for being the third major digital mapping and location platform alongside Google and Apple. HERE has had an interesting recent history. Originally NAVTEQ, one of the major cross-world road … Continue reading Inside HERE →
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I’ve just now published a number of maps on the CDRC Maps platform which uses the DataShine mapping style (more about DataShine) to show demographic data relating to consumer and other datasets. The maps relate to the Indices of Deprivation 2015, small-areas measure of deprivation in England, which were compiled and published at the end … Continue reading Changes in Deprivation in England, 2010-15 →
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When people decide to move to London, one very simple model of desired location might be to work out how important staying somewhere nice, cheap, and well located for the centre of the city is – and the relative importance of these three factors. Unfortunately, like most places, you can’t get all three of these … Continue reading Living Somewhere Nice, Cheap and Close In – Pick Two! →
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Here’s a graphic I’ve made by taking a number of screenshots of DataShine Commute graphics, showing the different methods of travelling to work in the City of London, that is, the Square Mile area at the heart of London where hundreds of thousands and financial and other employees work. All the maps are to the … Continue reading The City of London Commute →
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The Tube Line Closure Map accesses Transport for London’s REST API for line disruption information (both live and planned) and uses the information there to animate a geographical vector map of the network, showing closed sections as lines flashing dots, with solid lines for unaffected parts. The idea is similar to TfL’s official disruption map, … Continue reading Tube Line Closure Map →
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When I first moved to UCL CASA back in 2010, the first online map I created from scratch was one showing swings in the general election that year. So it seemed fitting to update the old code with the data from the 2015 general election, which took place last week. You can see the resulting … Continue reading General Election Maps for 2015 →
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Above is an excerpt of a large, coloured-dot based graphic showing the locations of street trees in Rotherhithe, part of the London Borough of Southwark in London, as released by them to the OpenStreetMap database back in 2010. You can download the full version (12MB PDF). Street trees are trees on public land managed by … Continue reading Street Trees of Southwark →
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I’ve created an Election 2015 Time Map which maps the estimated declaration times that the Press Association have published. It follows on from a similar map of the Scottish independence referendum. Each constituency is represented by a circle which is roughly in its centre (using a longest-interior-vertex centroid determined in QGIS). The area of the … Continue reading Election Time! →
Continue reading »An encouraging announcement from BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) a few days ago regarding future Open Data products from the Ordnance Survey (press release here) and the Ordnance Survey – two pieces of good news: The OS will be launching a new, detailed set of vector data as Open Data at the … Continue reading Ordnance Survey Open Data – The Next Level of Detail →
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Many of my visualisations have focused on London – there is an advantage of being in the city and surrounded by the data, which means that London is often the “default” city to map. However, I’ve created a couple of Manchester versions of my popular maps Ward Words and Ward Work. Logistics and time reasons … Continue reading Manchester – Languages and Jobs →
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<rant> Three maps with glaring errors which I came across yesterday. I’m hesitant to criticise – many of my own maps have, I am sure, issues too (i.e. my Electric Tube map, on the right, is deliberately way off.) But I couldn’t resist calling out this trio which I spotted within a few hours of … Continue reading Bad Maps →
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As a weekend project, I’ve made an interactive version of my London North/South artwork. As well as the blue and red house silhouettes, assembled in QGIS, I’ve added in GeoJSON files of the River Thames (from Ordnance Survey Vector Map District, like the buildings) and of tube/DLR/Overground stations – the location/name/network data is from this […]
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Cross-posted from Mapping London, edited slightly. This is a map of geolocated Tweets for the whole world – I’ve zoomed into London here. The map was created by Eric Fischer of Mapbox, who collected the tweets over several years. The place where each tweet is posted from is shown by a green dot. There are […]
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If you are a Londoner but felt that Tube Tongues passed you by, maybe because you live in south-east London or another part of the city that doesn’t have a tube station nearby, then here’s a special version of Tube Tongues for you. Like the original, it maps the most popularly spoken language after English […]
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I’ve extended my map of tube journeys and busy stations (previous article here) to add in an interesting metric from the 2011 census – that of the second most commonly spoken language (after English) that people who live nearby speak. To do this I’ve analysed all “output areas” which wholly or partly lie within 200m […]
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A final update to my Scottish Independence Referendum Data Map – the circle borders now show the turnout percentage, with the highest (>90%) as a solid green, the lowest showing as red. There is a weak (R^2 = 0.177) negative correlation between the Yes vote %, and the Turnout %, suggesting that the Yes campaign […]
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Scotland’s population is heavily skewed towards the central belt (Glasgow/Edinburgh) which will affect likely reporting times of the independence referendum in the early hours of Friday 19 September, this being dependent both on the overall numbers of votes cast in each of the 32 council areas, and the time taken to get ballot boxes from […]
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Above is a Wordle of the messages displayed on the big dot-matrix displays (aka variable message signs) that sit beside major roads in London, over the last couple of months. The larger the word, the more often it is shown on the screens. The data comes from Transport for London via their Open Data Users […]
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Lewisham’s “data” I’ve been looking at a lot of London Borough council websites recently, for the Election Map. I’d rather I hadn’t – just one website would be better – but in London, each borough council publishes its local election results first and foremost to its own website, rather than it being pushed to a […]
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The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) have produced a census for government open data availability for countries around the world, known as the Open Data Index. Each country is assigned scores for 10 attributes on openness and accessibility for each of 10 types of data (such as election results and pollution information). Currently the United Kingdom […]
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The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) have produced a census for government open data availability for countries around the world, known as the Open Data Index. Each country is assigned scores for 10 attributes on openness and accessibility for each of 10 types of data (such as election results and pollution information). Currently the United Kingdom […]
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Since launching the data store in early 2010, the Ordnance Survey have been releasing a number of updates to an interesting dataset – VectorMap District – which is a generalisation and simplification of their MasterMap “gold standard” dataset for Great Britain. The updates have been appearing roughly every 6-12 months, and by comparing them in […]
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Since launching the data store in early 2010, the Ordnance Survey have been releasing a number of updates to an interesting dataset – VectorMap District – which is a generalisation and simplification of their MasterMap “gold standard” dataset for Great Britain. The updates have been appearing roughly every 6-12 months, and by comparing them in […]
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At CASA we’ve always been keen on marrying the online with the tangible – such as the London Data Table (a real table, cut in the shape of London, showing live London data), PigeonSim (fly around a Google Earth view augmented with real-time information) and a couple of 3D printers, one of which was used […]
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I produced this data map which forms the front cover of this week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ). The graphic shows the volumes of Barclays Cycle Hire bikeshare users in London, based on journeys from February 2012 to January 2013 inclusive. The routes are the most likely routes between each pair of stations, as calculated using […]
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I produced this data map which forms the front cover of this week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ). The graphic shows the volumes of Barclays Cycle Hire bikeshare users in London, based on journeys from February 2012 to January 2013 inclusive. The routes are the most likely routes between each pair of stations, as calculated using […]
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[Buy this print!] London North/South shows every building block in central and inner city London, coloured blue if it’s north of the River Thames and red if it’s south. And that’s all. No other features are shown, and yet, from this simple premise, a map of the city appears. Almost every street is visible, as […]
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[Buy this print!] A couple of years I drew a quirky tube map to commemorate the completing of the circle on London’s Overground, affectionally known as the Ginger Line. The artwork has proven to be quite popular so I’ve produced a print run of an updated version of it. The new version retains the circles, […]
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The charity auction for the artwork/map that I created with Dr James Cheshire, Data Windows, took place last night, at the Granary Building in King’s Cross. Our work was part of the silent auction section and received four bids, going eventually for £140. James and I are delighted that our map sold, and contributed to […]
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