Colourful Oyster Card Visualisation Hits the News

A new map designed by CASA's Dr Ed Manley, a Research Associate on the MECHANICITY project, showing the most popular destinations on the London public transport network hit the news this week. The map – which uses the data from almost 50 million Oyster Card transactions – was covered in the Daily Mail, Evening Standard and Londonist.

The map shows the most popular destination station for each station on the London transport network, part of on-going research looking into what Oyster Card data can tell us about travel behaviour in London. As Ed explains in his blog about this work, the map demonstrates how each destination is favoured by different people from different areas of the city. While some of these patterns are well known, others are less so, and the absence of widely used stations such as Kings Cross, Green Park and Baker Street as major destinations is noteworthy.

The MECHANICITY project is working closely with Transport for London, and it is hoped that the findings from this continuing line of research will help inform future transport planning.