Taxi migration in Manhattan
While we're on the topic of things moving on a map of changing camera angles, class project Taxi, by Tom McKeogh, Eliza Montgomery and Juan Saldarriaga, shows the movements of said vehicles in Manhattan, over 24 hours.
Geographic location data for the origin and destination of each ride is combined with waypoint data collected from the Google Maps API in order to generate a geographically accurate representation of the trip. We used data from taxi rides originating or ending in the neighborhoods of Lincoln center or Bryant Park. The visualization recreates a 'breathing' map of Manhattan based on the migration of vehicles across the city over a period of 24 hours, displaying periods of intensity, density and decreased activity.
I hope they do another iteration of this project. I bet they could do a lot more on the temporal side of things.
[Digital Urban via @kennethfield]
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7 Comments (Add Yours)
I love this video and the music..who’s song is this?
I’m sorry, but this is kind of a disaster. As someone who just left NYC after living in Manhattan and Brooklyn for 7 years, this was really frustrating to watch. The constantly shifting viewpoint, including sideways (um, we freak out when people do that with a 3-D pie chart, so why is it cool or ok with a map?) made it really hard, if not impossible, to get a read on the geography. I could ‘see’ Central Park some of the time, but not all, I couldn’t always nail down which way was uptown vs. downtown, which bridge was which, etc. So I couldn’t effectively decode the data and learn anything, really, except that taxis move around a lot, there are more of them on the streets during the day than late at night, and that the avenues are further apart than the blocks. I already knew those things!
There are a lot of things that could be improved, but I think student projects should get more leeway.
If the map was shown from the top between 4 and 6 PM I would have found keeping the mystery going…
err… where do all the cabs go during early rush hour. or half my comment…
I appreciate your comments and I agree that at times the moving cameras make it hard to understand where things are happening. These two other animations (with 200,000 cab rides) have fixed cameras:
vimeo.com/36211223
vimeo.com/35433719
Let us know what you think.
I did the music! You can find all my music here: soundcloud.com/statikluft
Can you provide any details on how you made the visualization? Tools used, techniques for changing the camera angle?
Thanks!