Visualisation: William Teo | Analysis: Lin Zhaowei

There are over 280 public bus routes in Singapore with more than 3 million trips made each day on average.

Route lengths and travel times vary widely. Buses on some trunk routes take more than two hours to get from end to end, while most feeder buses make short loops of less than an hour.

How is each bus route here utilised? Using over 500 million EZ-Link transaction records from September 2014, we map out the “fingerprint” of every public bus service in Singapore.

Taking the example of bus service 2, we plot out all the stops of direction 1 as dots, and show the main roads where the stops are located.

We then reposition the dots and lines along a semi-circle arc.

We then add lines to the diagram to show the total number of journeys between every pair of bus stops. The thickness and height of each line represents the number of trips between these two stops, compared to the rest of the journeys on this bus service.

For example, this line shows the journeys from Blk 65 along New Upp Changi Rd to Bedok MRT Station. As this connection has the highest ridership along Bus 2 for this direction, the line is the thickest and highest.

When all the journeys are drawn, this is how the “fingerprint” looks:

We do the same thing for Direction 2, which gives us a full circle:

Now that you understand how each “fingerprint” is constructed, here is how one of them looks like: