Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Traffic Movement in London from Travel Cards

Why and how do people move around cities? Is it to get to work or to meet people? These are some questions one can explore if one has data. One can also explore what happens if a key transit stations or links is closed and how will this impact on the rest of the city.

Researchers from UCL have analyzed millions of Oyster Card journeys in a bid to understand how, why and where we travel in London. They used Transport for London’s database of 11 million records taken over one week from the Oyster Card electronic ticketing system.

Professor Michael Batty (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Soong Kang (UCL Management Science and Innovation) applied the techniques of statistical physics to their mountain of raw data.


 
Such data could also be very useful if one was trying to build some spatial interaction models or hybrid agent-based models of residential location and employment or pedestrian models.

Thanks to Digital Urban and Mike Batty for pointing this work out to me.

No comments: