mySociety blog » Travel Time Maps

Matthew’s just updated ScenicOrNot, the little game that we built to provide a ‘Scenicness’ dataset for Mapumental, to include a data dump of the raw data. The dump will update automatically on a weekly basis, but currently it contains averaged scores for 181,188 1*1km grid squares, representing 83% of the Geograph dataset we were using, or 74% of all the grid squares in Great Britain. It is, in other words, really pretty good, and, I think, unprecedented in coverage as a piece of crowd sourced geodata about a whole country.

It’s available under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3 Licence, and we greatly look forward to seeing what people do with it.

Stamen: Talented AND gorgeous

mySociety would never have been able to make Mapumental in the way we did if it wasn’t for the help of San Franciso-based geovisualisation gurus Stamen. They came up with the brilliant idea of sliders instead of static contours lines, they built the flash front end, and, crucially, they helped make sure all the contours had just the right degree of splodginess for a satisfyingly splodgy user experience.

Big thanks, therefore go to Michal Migurski, Shawn Allan, Tom Carden and the rest of the Stamen team who helped us get this far – we look forward to working much more with them in the future.

We’ve been hinting for a while about a secret project that we’re working on, and today I’m pleased to be able to take the wraps off Mapumental. It’s currently in Private Beta but invites are starting to flow out.

Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time – to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.

In its first iteration it’s specially tuned to help you work out where else you might live if you want an easy commute to work.

Francis Irving, the genius who made it all work, will post on the immense technical challenge overcome, soon. My thanks go massively to him; to Stamen, for their lovely UI, and to Matthew, for being brilliant as always.

Words don’t really do Mapumental justice, so please just watch the video :) Update: Now available here in HD too

Also new: We’ve just set up a TheyWorkForYou Patrons pledge to help support the growth and improvement of that site. I can neither confirm nor deny that pledgees might get invites more quickly than otherwise ;)

Our newly released travel time maps are currently shooting round the internet. It was great fun making them, and you might like to have a go too – there are plenty of public datasets you could overlay on the same base maps, using the same flash app (source code). There are a few notes about how we made them on the page itself, and the associated real time page. For a far more interesting view of the development process, read Tom Carden from Stamen’s account.

The most interesting blog post I’ve seen to come from this is Whitehall staff have no life by Simon Dickson, who was inspired by the maps to think about the destruction of social capital caused by commuting. “Whitehall staff on all but the highest salaries can’t expect to live anywhere near their work, and hence can’t expect to have any kind of a social (capital) life.”