The visualisation above shows the average relative duration of Boris Bikers’ weekday journeys over a 4 month period at hourly intervals. For each time step the average journey time (in seconds) from each docking station has been calculated.This information is interesting because it shows the preference for short journeys around the City of London, whilst people on the outskirts of the the scheme (especially to the west) take longer journeys. I also like the the fact that journey times around Soho and the West End are longest around 23:00- perhaps correlating with the number of after-work drinks consumed. In one visualisation you get to see the changes in the cyclists behaviour- from the early morning commuters through to the late night cruisers

The data come from Transport for London’s recent release of 1.4 million Barclays Cycle Hire journeys to their developers area (thanks to this FOI request). The data are said include all the journeys between 30 July 2010 and 3 November 2010, except those starting between midnight and 6am. In this analysis journeys taking more than one hour are not included (there are relatively few and many were actually the bikes being removed for maintenance) and docking stations with fewer than 10 journeys within each hour across the time period have also been ignored.

The maps can be improved in many ways- stay tuned for more developments and I will also post something a bit more technical about the methods I used etc to create the map (I used a strange cocktail of R and ArcGIS 10) .

I also recommend Ollie O’Brien’s (@oobr) brilliant interactive visualisations these data.

Battle of Branchage from seeper on Vimeo.

This second video is just as impressive and was produced to promote the Iron Man 2 soundtrack.  The projection is on to Rochester Castle in Kent.

ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 – Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle from seeper on Vimeo.

Thanks to William Cheshire for showing me these in the first place.

I found the film extremely compelling as it reflects strongly some of the work that many of us do in GIScience/ Quantitative Geography. The concept of tracking a person’s or population’s movements, for example, is very common;  Fabian Neuhaus does just this when looking at Urban Rhythms and CASA‘s CAPABLE project tracks children’s movements. Indeed, I may wish produce a diagram similar to the one below where kitchen areas are substituted for regions within a country and the housewife replaced by flows of migrants. Kitchen Stories has made me think a little harder about the interplay between the observer and the observed and also how easily positivism can be taken to almost laughable extremes. I therefore strongly recommend the film, not only because it is entertaining, but also for its frank and insightful take on the “top down” view of the world.