London in Motion

This visualization merges all 16 million daily transactions made on London's Oyster card with vehicle-location data from the city's 8,500 buses to infer the travel histories of that day's 3.1 million Oyster users. After inferring the times and locations of each bus boarding and alighting, bus and rail transactions are combined to reconstruct each anonymized cardholder's daily travel history.
Each pixel represents a 100-meter square section of Greater London, and the brightness of each of the three RGB color components indicates the number of riders in one of three categories. Green indicates the number of passengers in the transit system, whether on a bus or in one of several rail modes. Blue indicates the presence of riders prior to their first transaction of the day or after their last: it is assumed that the location of a rider's first or last transaction approximates their place of residence. Red indicates cardholders who are between transit trips, whether transferring, engaging in activities, or traveling outside the transit system.
By matching Oyster transaction records to data from the iBus vehicle-location system, buses are shown to traverse the street network at their observed speeds, and their brightness reflects the number of passengers on board. Rail customers tap their cards when entering or exiting stations, but their waiting times and choices of line and transfer location are not known (in this version). Rail passengers are therefore shown traveling in straight lines at constant speeds, interpolated between their entry and exit taps.
This visualization builds upon my thesis research, sponsored by the MIT Transit Lab and Transport for London. I'm now developing similar transit modeling tools at korbato.com.

[@emu_xox]

Wow, thank you, Jay! It is quite funny to see people bustling around and seeing the usual routine of people's lives: wake up, go to work, go home then all over again.

[@jerryrhee7748]

can't stop smiling

[@MagnaCartaTwo]

ocean of motion

[@JosephORourke]

heartbeat

[@360danialify]

Flipside ftw!

[@invinciblesticks]

Can we have one for Saturday?

[@LawrenceAlexanderInfo]

Brilliant. Can I ask how long it took to make?

[@Fonjask]

You already have CCTV.

[@gerards1044]

Great animation! I think I saw a HD version at the Media Lab. Is the HD one available somewhere?

[@HotLocalNun]

Passport - To show what country you're in Oyster Card - To show where exactly you're What next? Drones flying around the UK?

[@Partakers]

Fabulous and interesting, Jay! Thanks!

[@jaygrdn]

Thanks. The underlying research and software (to infer the travel patterns) was done over a couple of years, and the animation program was written in a weekend. And then there were many hours of finessing and experimenting (nonlinear brightness curves, learning about anti-aliasing, etc.)

[@AlbertChing]

Nice work Jay!

[@jaygrdn]

This example happens to be Wednesday, 11 May 2011 but the process is automated so it can be run on any day.

[@jaygrdn]

Thanks! Hope you're well and someplace warm.

[@HSPROTOCOL]

Amazing.