Lisbon Traffic Visualised

For his Masters Thesis, Pedro Cruz has developed a visualisation of Lisbon traffic. It represents 24 hours in the capital of Portugal.
The data is derived from 1534 vehicles recorded over one month. All the records are then put into a 24 hour stack.
The colours represent the speed of the traffic with green being fast and orange/red being slower. The main roads to bring traffic through the city with a higher speed show up in green where as the local roads beautifully draw the tight network in between.


Image by Pedro Cruz / Vehicule traffic in Lisbon on a Friday, visulisation inspired by Aron Koblins's flight patterns.

The visualisations are built in processing and Cruz experimented with a number of different typs, each emphasising a different aspect. He eventually settled for one that is combining the speed as well as the focus on the main road. I am not sure however what the trailings/diagonals, between points actually mean. Guess it could be were the tracking signal was ost, but that seems a bit too geometrical for this. On the other hand as an area it also doesn't make too much sense. Cruz describes it as a visual thing.
Interestingly the speed on the local roads seems to be fairly constant, were as the speed on the main roads seems to slow down at night. This is surprising, since one would think that during the day there is more traffic and drivers would naturally slow down or even get slowed down by clunked up roads. on the other hand, at night there is more room on these roads and drivers would go faster and race around the city.
However this is great visualisation work. For more such visualisation visit Cruz's blog or his vimeo channel.



Found via Datavisulisation.ch .