Mapped: Every Bus Trip in London

People often say “I waited ages for a bus and then they all turned up at once”. As the map above shows if all the timetabled buses in London literally did show up at the same time you would be stuck in an impressive traffic jam. It represents the 114 thousand or so bus trips that are completed every day in London (a trip corresponds to a single bus completing its route). Roads with more buses running along them are wider and redder, those with fewer buses are narrower and yellower and those with no buses have been excluded. The map demonstrates the impressive coverage of London’s bus network and how integral it is to London’s transport infrastructure.

Joan Serras (the data guru who also produced the above video last year) calculated the routes* between each of the bus stops in London and used the timetables to calculate how many times a bus passes along them. This method is an improvement on previous work (and the video), which has simply assumed the buses travel in a straight line between stops- in the map above the buses follow the road network. The map’s simplicity disguises the fact that it contains routing information calculated between 22,565 bus stops (in the GLA and a little bit beyond). You get a sense of this complexity if you take a look at the underlying spatial data (see below: each dot is a bus stop).

The top map will be on display as part of CASA’s Smart Cities Conference taking place this Friday.

*This is the shortest route between two bus stops using as cost a measure of travel time deduced using the length and the speed limit on each road link.