This is so AWESOME, it's SICK!

When I found this data graph for DC's awesome Capital BikeShare, I became nearly giddy.  I've been playing with it for the last hour or so, and I'm like a kid in a candy store.  My heart is aflutter - for real! All my favorite things!  I love metrics.  I love cities.  I love interactive real time data.  I love bikes, and more so bike shares.  I love CaBi. so proud to be one of the founding members (as one of the first 2,000 members with a free t-shirt and commemorative keyfob....(geekster grin: Geek + Hipster = Geekster!)).  I love public transport, and more so if it's extra-green and innovative public transport.

Here's the link again...now let's play!  So much data depicted on first click.  First, the overall view of the CaBi program is the homescreen.  Larger circles denote larger stations with more bike docks.  The color of the circles show how full/empty the docks are - blue is emptier, deep red is an completley full station.  The graph is realtime, and the lower right hand corner gives usage stats.  Right now, pretty late on a Thursday evening, use is a low, sleepy 3%.  The max simultaneous usage for today was 173 bikes, in use, or a respectable 20% of all available bikes in use (more about this later).  That lower right hand info box has some pretty cool extra features.  You can show or hide a ticker which tells you bikes going in and out of station realtime.  It also shows usage and distribution imbalance datagraphs for the day.  Around 5pm, today the fewest bikes were in docks - or conversely, the most were in use.

Even more fun...there is an animation button where we can see those station circles go from blue to red and back again in a neato timelapse run.  See how, people head downtown, and then back to residential districts over the course of a day.  Sounds like a commuter city, until you realize this is by bikes, not crawling on the Beltway!  Mixed-use zones - shopping/residential/business like Dupont Circle and Capitol Hill get used all day.

Then, there's a little thrill ride here...Click on a station, and see it's dock stats for the last 24-hour period - the peaks and valleys of rush hour, the sharp zig-zags of frequent use.  For example, 16th and U has a precipitous drop from totally full to totally empty during the morning rush hour, as this high-density, young, urban hipster neighborhood heads out to work, presumably downhill towards downtown.  The Union Station dock does the same, with an opposite effect - all the bikes are taken from this busy transit hub around 6pm and dispersed to other docks within the nearby residential neighborhood.  One of my local stations at 14th and D Streets SE gets decent use throughout the day, but by 9pm, it's docks are full.  This matches my recent experience, when one evening, I grabbed a CaBi bike from the pool toward home, and found no docks at this station.  I had to ride a few blocks farther, though not too much off my path, to return my bike to a different station.  And Eastern Market (8th and Penn SE) and Dupont Circle stations get a fair amount of usage throughout the day.

And that awesome little addictive live data set led me to the supra-awesome blog Suprageography: I see data, I make maps that covers bikeshare data stats for several urban bikeshare programs around the world.  WOW!  I totally [HEART] that Oliver guy!  He recently posted about a big day for bikesharing - Easter Sunday - where he notes there was HUGE usage in DC (in the #1 ranking), Miami, and London - all soaring above 35% simultaneous bikes in use.  In DC 37% of our 872 bikes were in use at about 4 in the afternoon (I'm reasonably sure I had a bike out about that time).  He notes that usage rates above 30% stress the system, and it is difficult to find a bike in many places.  His table shows that not only is DC an amazing bikesharing city, but we have a relatively large program with our almost 900 books, especially with the relative size of our population compared to some of the other bikesharing cities - like London and Mexico City.  And, as he kindly points out so I don't have to be all puffy about it, America is beating Europe!


Yay, CaBi!  Yay DC!  I could eat this stuff all day.  

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Mind-blowing!!

This wonderful NYTimes feature, Mapping America: Every City, Every Block depicts 2010 census data through powerful color density graphics for every block.  Maps show race and ethnicity, income, education, housing, and families stats for any zip code and the specific census tracts of each - in my urban area this is about .25 square mile.  Go ahead, plug in your zip, zoom in, and get insight to the demographic composition of your own neighborhood.

I could have played with this for hours, but for now, I've learned some fascinating statistics for my little corner of the world, Census Tract 6802:

Dispatch from London

Tube strike wreaks havoc on my life (and London, in general):  Today's tube strike brought gridlock to London, and a virtual standstill to Underground operations.  Limited services meant some lines were completely suspended; some stations were completely closed, and where trains were running they were infrequent and overcrowded.  I used a combination of taxi, private hire car service, tube, and walking.  


London map starts to stick in my head by way of my feet:  I covered a good part of London on foot today from Oxford Circus to Soho to Leicester Square to Trafalger Square to Westminster to Waterloo.  I lost my bearings a few times, and started off in the wrong direction, but quickly reoriented and got on my way.  I think I'm finally beginning to connect London.  I've got the Southwark down from Waterloo to the Tate Modern to The Cut, onward east to London Bridge and Canary Wharf. I also think I get Vauxhall and Battersea Power Plant in the other direction on the south side of the Thames.  Today I connected some of the northern side, but without a sense of the river nearby, I get completely dizzy disoriented.   Still, I think I now have a sense of Westminster to Hyde Park, Marble Arch and Edgware Road.  As well as how Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Regent Street, Soho, Chinatown, and Leicester Square connect - though I have to say, I am not so interested here.  Tomorrow, I may actually get to Brick Lane.  It's amazing how walking will get you through and around a city - it's finally clicking.


New jet lag remedy discovered: Travel the first week of November, the week between the time changes in Europe and the US.  For one week only, when London has already changed back to standard time and before the US changes to standard time a week later, the time difference is just 4 hours.  Jet lag is 20% easier to overcome than the rest of the year!

I [HEART] maps; I [HEART] Philadelphia.

Graphic designer, Joel Katz, of the amazing city of Philadelphia has created a redesign of the map for city's regional public transit system.  While it is apparently geographically inaccurate - hmmm, seems sort of counterintuitive for a map, no? - it is apparently user-friendly and clearly lays out the order of stations, an important function of a transit map.

Personally, I find the map striking in its design - bold, simple, artistic - to be praised for its form, as well as its function.  The soft curves of each line is not a usual feature of a transit map - a lovely distinctive feature.  One really gets a sense of systems - public transit systems, flowcharts, bodily systems.  It reminds me of a  modern family tree, a scale, a collection of vases and urns.  I like the way the important stuff - Center City, the major subway and elevated lines are bolder and more distinct than the secondary lines to suburbs.  I like the way Philly's two rivers - the Delaware and the Schuykill - are displayed as washes of light blue ribbons.

Born a city-child, I began taking the subway to my public school in seventh grade (Lombard to Spring Garden stations) through high school (Lombard to Olney stations) on the Broad Street line.  I think I turned out OK.

I [HEART] maps. I [HEART] NY.

The New York City subway map has been updated.  This is the basic map that has been updated and edited since 1979.  It widens Manhattan, shrinks Staten Island, turns the parks from emerald to olive, and deepens the blue of the Hudson and East Rivers.  It removes extraneous information, like bus connections and landmarks - helpful, but crowded. It looks bolder and cleaner, as seen in the great interactive map feature of the New York Times online.

The previous map, introduced in 1972, designed by Massimo Vignelli, was more stylized and abstract.  I actually quite like it, from an artistic point of view at least.  More conceptual than practical, which is not great for tourists.  I enjoyed this description of the Vignelli map:

It was accurate in the same way a poem could describe a playground in March. Descriptive and accurate. But sometimes puzzling. People got lost using it. 

Here are links to the DC Metro and the London Underground maps.

I love maps.  I love NY.  I love subways and decent public transport.  I love design.