interacting with flows

Using contactless smart cards like the Oyster card allows tracking of the origins and destinations of public transport users. The following video shows how we can explore flows of people by selecting a station (or a set of stations) and animating where people go/come from there. The flows’ geometry does not try to capture the transit network topology, but illustrate flows of people.

Origins-destinations matrices, do not allow to recover the route passengers take to go from A to B. In the next video, origins and destinations are combined with survey data where passengers are questioned about what route do they take when going from A to B. This allows to understand congestion at the station level (pie chart size proportional to number of people, entering and leaving the station). Since flows now represent routes, the graph now resembles more closely the topology of the transit network.

Acknowledgments: in collaboration with The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis - UCL.