Blow me away travel maps

Absolutely stunning project from MySociety, a bunch of geniuses, on truly useful travel maps.

This mapping work was very important because it provides a potentially revolutionary new way of working out the best place for people to live and work.

You can see some examples here.

This one shows which areas it makes more sense to get public transport to work in Edinburgh, and which areas it makes more sense to drive.



They compare car vs cycling and one allow users to set both the maximum time they’re willing to commute, and the median house price they’re willing or able to pay.

There are two ways in which you can get a travel map of this sort centred on a location of interest to you.

If you’re a interested user, you can contact your local transport journey planning organisation, for example Transport for London or San Francisco BART, and encourage them to work with us to get a system like this working interactively on their websites.

If you’re a rich user, or company, you can commission us to create bespoke maps – we’re a non-profit after all and all the money will help run our other projects. And if you’re really rich, you can work with us to develop a real-time service of the sort that the transport agencies should be doing. Francis Irving from mySociety has written a technical review on the challenges of developing a real-time map generation system.

If you’re interested in working with us on this, email karl@mysociety.org.