Taxis in London
This is another visualization from the BBC’s Britain From Above series that I mentioned a week or two ago. Here, they map the movements of 380 taxis over a 24-hour period.
If I were an engineer at Google, I would use my 20% project time to create something like this showing anonymous search data from Google Maps. By highlighting spikes in location popularity and displaying the results as heat maps, I bet some visually interesting patterns would emerge such as people going to the park, the beach, or the mountains on the weekends. Loopt, Yahoo!, and a few of the popular location-aware apps for the iPhone could also do it. They all have plenty of data for any major metro area, I’m sure.
This was a brilliant, albeit short, series which I absolutely loved. Britain (and probably other Western countries) function on the brink of chaos on a daily basis. One mistake e.g. a train breakdown and the knock-on effect is huge.
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