Mapzen
I have played with Mapzen’s Isochrone serivce in the past with a simple visualization of walksheds.
Recently Mazen updated the isochrone API to allow for a more fine-grained selection of exactly what transit services to include or exclude in transit routing, and they created an amazing mobility explorer based on that.
Partially motivated by chatting with two TransLink planners I decided to riff off of that and take a look at how well TransLink serves different parts of Vancouver.
Mapzen again upped their game by publishing their Mobility API. This is super exciting for anyone interested in a whole range of mobility questions. A question I have seen is how to adapt that to specific needs. So here is a quick example how to customize walksheds.
All we do is set up a quick map that computes the 5 and 10 minute walksheds when the user clicks on the map.
I keep getting questions about Mobi stats these days. Rather than ansering them one by one I decided to just offer a live view into data generated by our shadow API. I made two simple views, the most recent month of daily bike checkout counts and the most recent week of hourly bike checkout counts. The data issues mentioned in our previous post still apply. For data geeks, here is a link to a very useful paper that compared estimates like I make to real usage data.
Vancouver finally has a bikeshare system. And everyone is hoping it will succeed, despite the obstacles BC’s mandatory helmet law poses for the system. So we are eager to find out how things are going with Mobi.
To set the background, consider that Seattle’s Pronto is getting less than 1 ride per bike per day after half a year in operation. In comparison, bike shares that are considered ‘successful’ in North America get 3 to 5 rides per bike per day.
It is no secret that we at MountainMath like bikes. And maps. And open data and sharing. We guess you know where this is going.
Vancouver has finally gotten a bike share system, and we are loving it. So we took the occasion to take our old bike infrastructure maps, polished them up a bit using Mapzen’s bike map style and adapted it for our purposes.
The result is our Vancouver Bike Share Map.
