Bikes provide amazing low-tech transport, yet they still somehow get written off by conservatives and futurist types alike. As such, they’re too often not treated as the important ingredient to a city’s transportation system that they are. They’re deemed the province of hippies or hipsters, and American cities especially have a severe dearth of infrastructure aimed at encouraging cycling.Which is partly why this stunning video caught my attention — it helps re-conceptualize the ubiquity of bicycles in an urban environment. The video animation, created by “visualisation specialist” Jo Wood, shows 5 million bike trips across London, as registered by Boris Bikes’ (the city’s bike-share scheme) riders over the last two years.New Scientist has more:the least travelled routes begin to fade out after about 15 seconds – “like a graphic equaliser,” says collaborator Andrew Huddart, also at City University. Around the 1-minute mark, structure emerges from the chaos and three major systems become clear: routes around, and through, the lozenge-shaped Hyde Park in the west, and commutes in and out of King’s Cross St Pancras in the north and between Waterloo and the City in the east. In the animation, the curve of a route indicates the most frequent direction of travel: trajectories leave a station in a straight line and then hook into their destination…
“[Visual analytics] allow transport planners and organisations such as Transport for London to make better informed decisions to support the movement of people around our cities,” says Wood. The next level, says Huddart, is to add anonymised user profiles to the data. This would give more information about people’s use of the bicycles over time, which could lead to better placement of new docking stations and help balance load across the network, he says.Great. Now do one for Copenhagen, and we’ll really see some fireworks.