This GIF shows the heartbeat of the London Underground, pulsing as passengers make their way around the city over the course of a typical weekday.
UCL researcher Oliver O’Brien took data published by Transport for London (TfL) to create this stunning visualisation of the city’s underground railways. TfL recorded the exact number of people exiting and entering tube stations every 15 minutes to build a map of the daily journeys of the city’s millions of commuters.
Stations are highlighted green when there's a net number of people leaving the station, and red when more people are entering than leaving. As you’d expect, the Tube lines ‘pulse’ from 8:15 - 8:30 and 17:00 - 17:15 as people working in the capital begin their journey to and from work.
Nearly five million journeys were tracked in a single day to create the data visualisation, but users can also select individual Tube stations to see how passenger traffic varies from place to place.
Leicester Square, for example, only reaches its passenger peak from 22:15 - 22:30 as theatregoers make their way home after evening performances. Some suburban stations, however, experience double peaks in the afternoons as schoolchildren and then commuters make their way back home.
Far out in east London, the peak of passengers arriving at West Ham station is an hour earlier than the overall peak across the Tube network. The data is so detailed, in fact, that you can check how many passengers were riding between two particular stations at any 15-minute interval during the day.
The visualisation also lets you compare figures from 2012 with much more recent data. Some things haven’t changed – the Central and Northern lines are still the busiest Tube Lines – but in Tube stations such as Stratford, the composition of passengers is changing. Since the regeneration of the area in the wake of the 2012 Olympics, now there are nearly as many people arriving at the station in the morning rush hour as there are leaving it at the same time.
What the visualisation doesn’t include, however, is data on the newly-launched Night Tube. Two years after it was originally announced, the first Night Tube trains left Victoria and Central line stations on Friday 19 August and continued to run until 4:30 in the morning. It was the first time ever that London Underground ran a train service consistently all night.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
