The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
Inequality & Mass Transit in the Bay Area
A recent feature in The New Yorker juxtaposed New York City’s subway stops with their residents’ incomes. Like NYC, San Francisco has people of both extreme poverty and wealth, often living toe-to-toe. We wondered how those graphs would look in our neck of the woods. The results show the Bay Area’s economic inequality and its relationship with transit and urban form.
What Google’s Self-Driving Car Can See
Idea Lab’s Bill Gross recently tweeted this photo, showing what one of Google’s self-driving cars sees when it attempts to make a left turn at a junction.
Metro cuff bracelets by Design Hype
The Frustration of San Francisco’s Mass-Transit Riders, Visualized
The Globe obtained fare data for one cab driver. It reveals a job filled with frustrating days and meager rewards.
Metrominuto: The Subway-Inspired Map For Pedestrians
Walkability is a subject many cities are increasingly getting involved with. Our legs are often overlooked when thinking about transport in the city, with municipalities passionately constructing bicycle lanes and roads as far as the eye can see whilst competely forgetting about the pedestrian’s needs. Instead of focusing on these forms of transport, Pontevedra in northwest Spain has been trying for the last 15 years to make their city more walker-friendly. To further improve walkability, they have created a subway-inspired map for pedestrians.
The official WMATA transit map (designed for clarity & legibility) vs. the actual geographical layout of the DC Metro
Metro_Compared (by Don Whiteside)
From the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, these maps paint the picture of transportation in the 1800s.
Openings and Construction Starts Planned for 2013
This year, more than $64.3 billion worth of transit expansion projects will begin construction, continue construction, or enter into service in the United States. It’s a huge investment, much of it the product of extensive state and local spending.
This map I made shows the accessibility of the Metro. Each circle has a 1/2 mile diameter and centered about the points of entry to Metro Stations - they represent a 5 minute walking distance (1/4 mile) to each station. Clearly, there are a lot of holes and “access deserts,” the largest of which includes the greater Capitol Hill neighborhood (which is one of DC’s oldest and most dense neighborhoods). Further, this is a map focused on the core of the historically planned city of Washington, the access deserts only get worse as you zoom out to the entirety of the District and includes areas of the city that are most economically and socially depressed.
There is also another layer of information here that is often overlooked in evaluating transit access. Not only do these gaps, holes, and deserts make the livability of a city suppressed for residents who live outside of access areas, but this lack of access also makes the knowing, understanding, and therefore ownership of a city much more difficult for all those who live there.
Heat Map Visualizes Your Daily Commute
Local info site Trulia launched a Commute Map that lets users dynamically visualize their journey to work.
It’s especially useful for those planning to move to a new area. The interactive and responsive map helps users see commute times to work and other areas by translating the information into a heat bubbles.
An Eames Idea That Didn’t Fly: The Expanding Airport
Here’s a gem from the MCM archives (via Visual News): “‘The Expanding Airport’ was created for the presentation of the new international airport for Washington, D.C. in 1958. Through familiar sounds and experiences, comparisons and basic infographics, the Eameses were able to distill complex concepts into something digestible and clear.”
3D Visualisation of World Flight Paths
Robin Edwards, a student on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, has used Processing to create a visualisation using data from OpenFlights.org. The clip below visualises approx 50,000 active flight-paths,interpolating motion along great circle paths for dynamic effect.
