Thursday, August 18, 2011

Data: Animating Auckland's Public Transport

Google transit feeds as data. Does raleigh have any?

Animating Auckland's Public Transport

Animating_Auckland.jpg



This post was written by Andy Kirk, founder and editor of visualisingdata.com. Andy will be guest editing Information Aesthetics for a short period while Andrew takes a well earned break.

Chris McDowall is a cartographer and data enthusiast from New Zealand, and author of the SciBlogs Seeing Data site.

In January 2011, Chris published details of a project he'd been working on to animate Auckland's public transport network using data from MAXX Auckland transport Google transit feed.

This proved to be an extremely popular visualization but, as is the designer's prerogative, Chris identified certain features that he would like to refine in due course.

He has now completed most of these updates and a second iteration has been published [sciblogs.co.nz/seeing-data/]. You can view the animated movie the below or, if you are viewing this post via a RSS feedreader, by clicking here.

This updated version includes a number of improvements behind the scenes to the geometry data, which may not appear obvious to the untrained eye. The most visible and enlightening improvement is the distinguishing of transport types using different colours for buses (teal), ferries (blue) and trains (red).

Keep an eye out on the Seeing Data blog, over the new few days, for more details about how the animation was created, which should prove very interesting.


Sent from my iPhone

1 comments:

Vikhyath Reddy said...

Including the graphic of commuters who use the public transportation system can help identify bottlenecks and can tell us which areas on the map need better service.