Conducting the public transport network

How does the public transport network sound? What noises could you derive from the different lines and tracks?

Probably commuters will have a very individual and specific sound scape in mind, thinking about the journey on the public transport network. Every journey sounds different and heavily depends on various factors. But there is still a general feeling for different spaces according to sounds.

Very much as discussed earlier in the MyTime interview 'On SoundTimeSpace' with Salomé Voegelin sound is generating presence. As she puts it: "Sound is never an a priori, it is not there before its experience, but is generated in our audition and this audition is what extends its present moment to include all that could sound as well as what does".


Image taken from mta.me by Alexander Cheng / NY Subway trains visualised as a string instrument. Turn your head phones up.

Relating this back to the transport network, Alexander Chen has developed his own interpretation of the transport network music and uses the New York Subway map to conduct a simple piece. The lines are turned into strings and are played at the crossing of lines. When ever train crosses another line it playes the line-string like a string instrument.

The rhythm is based on the actual train shedule. The trains are running as feed is pulled in directly from the MTA's public API. The actuall visualisation runns on MTA.me. The site is built in HTML5/Javascript with some flash running the sound.

Alexander explains: "Length determines pitch, with longer strings playing lower notes. When a string is in the middle of being drawn by a subway car, its pitch is continually shifting. The sounds are cello pizzicato from the wonderful freesound.org, a set recorded by corsica_s. A complete chromatic scale was too dissonant. Ultimately I settled on a simple major C scale but with the lowest note as a raised third E, which keeps it from ever feeling fully resolved."

And as a suggestion for your next day at work come via a comment left on Alexanders blog: "Thanks to your boss suggestion, I opened up 3 tabs and I haven’t felt like turning my iTunes back on again because the entropic free jazz strumming is so bewitching! Sweetness on top of sweetness."

Maybe seeing the tube network in such a way might alter the individual soundscape. Length of journey and time of crossing. Also have a look at Alexanders mta.me for the full screen visuals that are actually based on the 1972 Massimo Vignelli (hear Vignelli talking about his work HERE. Extract from the great Helvetica film) diagram. And also note that the lines since have changed and between 00h00 and 02h00 Alexander runs some ghost trains to keep the concert going. It runs as a look so you can listen to it all day long.

Connectivity and Sustainability in 21st Century Cities

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A guest post by Duncan Smith, contributing to the second Ecological Urbanism discussion hosted by Annick Labeca, Taneha Bacchin, DPR-Barcelona and single-blogs.
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Connectivity and Sustainability in 21st Century Cities
Transportation is only one domain of urban sustainability, yet it is a critical aspect as connectivity is (arguably) the fundamental social and economic purpose of cities. Furthermore transportation has widespread consequences for urban quality of life, and of course for energy use and carbon emissions. This discussion is a reflection on a talk given by Prof Michael Wegener at CASA UCL.
The history of urbanism is one of massively increasing mobility, both within urban regions and between them in terms of travel, trade and globalisation. The graph below illustrates the dramatic change in vehicle miles over the last fifty years in the UK. This has been enabled by greatly reduced costs of motoring, through unprecedented fossil fuel exploitation and growth in the global car industry. Yet this change is fundamentally a result of social behaviour, that is the desire of people to maximise their opportunities and choice by using increased mobility to live, work, shop and socialise over greater and greater distances.


Figure taken from Department for Transport, 2009b / UK total travel distance by mode 1952-2008.

Wegener argues this era of increased mobility has ended. The threat of anthropogenic climate change compels us to massively reduce transportation carbon emissions, and commitments made for example at the EU level to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 require massively reduced motorised travel and subsequently mobility. The second strand to this argument comes from the finite nature of oil supplies and the inevitable price increases as global supplies dwindle. Unfortunately these demands are in sharp contrast to major economic trends of increased globalisation, with greater interaction between cities, and specialisation with intensive spatially segregated economic functions requiring greater travel. Current urban form solutions to this potential conflict revolve around ideas of ‘networked’ and ‘polycentric’ cities, with multiple nodes closely integrated through public and active transport links.
Just as modernism fetishised speed and motorisation, technological fixes to urban transportation sustainability are constantly promoted and are always just around the corner. Amazing innovations in electric drive train vehicles can remove local pollution from cities, but will not overcome energy and carbon emission challenges. A more radical overhaul of the automobile is required. The humble pedestrian, bicycle and the tram/streetcar currently remain the best tools we have for providing connectivity and liveability, and the most successful cities for sustainable travel (e.g. Copenhagen, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Munich..) prioritise these modes. Progress relies on planning and design that enables connectivity through less energy intensive means, as well as a political consensus to tax fossil fuels, which research shows is the powerful means of influencing travel behaviour.

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Duncan Smith is a researcher in GIS and urban geography at CASA UCL, completing a PhD on the topic of polycentric urban form and sustainable development. He also works as a research fellow at the Greater London Authority Economics Unit.

Public Transport Visualisations

More and more location data becomes available and makes it possible to visualise the beat of the city over longer periods and/or compressed as a speed up sequence.

Eric Fischer has recently published online a few mappings of online available location data. Most popular were the flickr maps of world cities. This time it is bus movement data through which he visualises San Francisco. The data was collected of the period of one month.


Clip by Eric Fischer / Overlay of Muni vehicle movements for all of June, 2010.
Thanks to Matt for the link via flowingdata.

Visualisation of public transport vehicles in Vienna, Austria put together by Max Kossa on wissenbelasted.com . It is built from a database containing 1048 stops along 44 bus lines, 18 night bus lines and 29 tram lines. Within 24 hours there are some 510.026 total stops for all vehicles.

The different vehicle types are coded in colour. Green are the night buses. This is quite obvious at 01:30. At this time the regular service shuts down and the blue (tram) and red (bus) dots vanish for the rest of the night.

The author has published the scraped data base file for download if you want to have a play.


Clip by Max Kossa /24 hours in the life of the public transport network of Vienna.

Transport - the Machine is on

Visualisation of the transport network of Washington D.C. over 24 hours. Developed by Rahul Nair in Processing. It is visualised in processing with a data set from WMATA transit system. The transport network has made their dat available through the open Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). If you want to have a go the set is available from HERE. It has been made available to allow for the third party development of application, especially mobile applications for travellers. This way the transport provider hopes to source attractive and convenient applications without having to pay for it. A good plan I guess. However, what I didn’t know is that there is a whole lot of feeds available through this GTFS schema. The list can be found HERE, only US, but pretty cool.
Beautiful how the the dots buzz around. The back and forward pattern is not as obvious as expected, for this the D.C. area is simply too busy. The overall pattern of an ebb between two and four in the morning is something one would expect, however it seems surprisingly short.



Second try can be found HERE.

Lunch Time TimeLapse

Once more a nice timelapse for the approaching weekend. I think the title of the clip actually is a bit misleading, or a t least it unveils to much of the detail about making it. However the coours and the blending in is really nice and makes you wana go to Liverpool street for a lunch break.

Lunch-Time-Lapse Thursday 09-04-09 from Ace Renegade on Vimeo.