London Underground accelerated time disruption map
One of the things I noticed during travels round the world was that everywhere else we went, the trains ran on time. Thailand, Argentina, Korea, Tokyo (where if your train is late you get a note to show your boss, I hear), in all these places, a late train would be an event. If you think about it it makes sense; trains run on rails, they have controlled speeds, there shouldn’t be any congestion.
In Britain, where trains are so routinely late that punctuality has been redefined as ‘within 20 minutes of scheduled time’ and even then only around 80% can make it, the people have forgotten that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that in the rest of world, including the really poor parts, it just isn’t.
I stopped travelling on the London Underground during peak times a few years ago, and avoid it whenever possible. The thought of going through this summer ritual is too much for me.
A while back, on their otherwise execrable website, Transport for London began to publish disruption maps. These are kind of useful, but they don’t give one the bigger picture. Very few of us spend more than an hour or two a day down there. Perhaps I’m just unlucky? Is my commute on the worst line? if I bought a house near a Jubilee line station, would I get to work on time more often?
Like all British people with an interest in visualising data, I’m a huge fan of Harry Beck’s tube map, even if we ignore it’s more obvious flaws ( if the thing is so damn usable, then why aren’t the lines named after the colours?). I also love visualisations that move, and so I’m dreamy with pleasure to be be able to combine the two…
Get to the point, stef
15 days ago, I wrote a script that grabs and saves the disruption map every 10 minutes. After
- adding a timestamp to each image with imagemagick
- removing all images recorded between 1:00am and 5:00 am (The Transport for London site is happy to show the tube as fully functioning when it is closed, but I think that’s a tad disingenuous)
I compiled them into a quicktime movie.
Remember, “Disrupted lines appear in their normal colour!”
Update: Some people are having trouble with this on XP, but I can’t reproduce the problem. Sorry
15 days of Tube Hell in 3 minutes (Bittorrent of the Quicktime)
( dull old http Quicktime)
Furthermore, I now have a big pile of data upon which to do further visual analysis:
For instance:
The filesize of a colour-free-hence-disruption-free map is 52398 bytes. 469 of the 2165 images have this filesize, and a quick
find . -size 52398c |xargs eog
allows me to confirm that indeed, the
London Underground is disruption free, a remarkable 22% of the time it is running.
My advice is to go and buy a bike.
(Copyright notice: I didn’t have permission to do this. No doubt, again, I’m breaking all sorts of TFL copyright. No doubt, there’s an army of teeth-sucking lawyers getting ready to sue me deeper underground than Hampstead station. Don’t bother, it was a joke; if you send me a letter, I’ll take it down, and you’ll have increased the misery in the world by a small amount. Sleep tight.)