Wednesday, October 04, 2006

What a cool map

Henry, a friend who works for A Competitor aCtivE iN The consUlting aREna, pointed me at these cool travel-time maps.

The idea is that the map centres on a specific point and is then colour coded to show how long it would take to get from anywhere else on the map to that point.

In other words, it allows you to judge travel times by the reality of public transport and the roads rather than by a coarse judgement of direct distance. Neat!

 

 

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I particularly like the maps showing the difference in travel time for different modes of transport e.g. train versus car.

Anonymous said...

Personally I would swapped the colours: it seems more intuitive to me that red is a serious colour, which means a long travel time, not a short one.

But I'd certainly be interested to know what Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com) would think of these. The obvious disadvantage of these maps is they are only useful for one point. See this for an alternative strategy (only works for the tube map but you might be able to mutate a real map in the same way):

http://www.oskarlin.com/2005/11/29/time-travel/

Richard Brown said...

They should commercialise their software.... I would pay good money for a personalised one of these!

Anonymous said...

Looks a lot like a map describing the spread of a virus. So, public transport is bad. QED.

Richard Brown said...

So *that's* where I caught my cold!