Today, I’ve been experimenting with a new way to visualize origin-destination pairs (ODs). The following image shows my first results:

The ideas was to add a notion of direction as well as uncertainty. The “flower petals” have a pointed origin and grow wider towards the middle. (Looking at the final result, they should probably go much narrower towards the end again.) The area covered by the petals is a simple approximation of where I’d expect the bike routes without performing any routing.

To get there, I reprojected the connection lines to EPSG:3857 and calculated connection length and line orientation using QGIS Field Calculator $length operator and the bearing formula given in QGIS Wiki:

(atan((xat(-1)-xat(0))/(yat(-1)-yat(0)))) * 180/3.14159 + (180 *(((yat(-1)-yat(0)) < 0) + (((xat(-1)-xat(0)) < 0 AND (yat(-1) - yat(0)) >0)*2)))

For the style, I created a new “flower petal” SVG symbol in Inkscape and styled it with varying transparency values: Rare connections are more transparent than popular ones. This style is applied to the connection start points. Using the advanced options “size scale” and “rotation”, it is possible to rotate the petals into the right direction as well as scale them using the previously calculated values for connection length and orientation.

Update

While the above example uses pretty wide petals this one is done with a much narrower petal. I think it’s more appropriate for the data at hand:

Most of the connections are clearly heading south east, across Charles River, except for that group of connections pointing the opposite direction, to Harvard Square.

Hubway is a bike sharing system in Boston and they are currently hosting a data visualization challenge. What a great chance to play with some real-world data!

To get started, I loaded both station Shapefile and trip CSV into a new Spatialite database. The GUI is really helpful here – everything is done in a few clicks. Afterwards, I decided to look into which station combinations are most popular. The following SQL script creates my connections table:

create table connections (
start_station_id INTEGER,
end_station_id INTEGER,
count INTEGER,
Geometry GEOMETRY);


insert into connections select 
start_station_id, 
end_station_id, 
count(*) as count, 
LineFromText('LINESTRING('||X(a.Geometry)||' '||Y(a.Geometry)||','
                          ||X(b.Geometry)||' '||Y(b.Geometry)||')') as Geometry
 from trips, stations a, stations b
where start_station_id = a.ID 
and end_station_id = b.ID
and a.ID != b.ID
and a.ID is not NULL
and b.ID is not NULL
group by start_station_id, end_station_id;

(Note: This is for Spatialite 2.4, so there is no MakeLine() method. Use MakeLine if you are using 3.0.)

For a first impression, I decided to map popular connections with more than one hundred entries. Wider lines mean more entries. The points show the station locations and they are color coded by starting letter. (I’m not yet sure if they mean anything. They seem to form groups.)

Some of the stations don’t seem to have any strong connections at all. Others are rather busy. The city center and the dark blue axis pointing west seem most popular.

I’m really looking forward to what everyone else will be finding in this dataset.