A Consuming Experience

Previously I posted about Oskar Karlin's innovative online London Underground Tube map, which showed you the distance in terms of travel time (how many minutes' away) of other London Tube stations from the Elephant & Castle tube station.

My wishlist for enhancements included the ability to check how long it would take to get to another Tube station from any chosen start station, not just Elephant & Castle; and also for the map to use the same colours for the different Tube lines as London Underground's official map.

Well Tom Carden's interactive travel time Tube map, inspired by Mr Karlin's original map, does exactly that. (NB it needs a recent Java plugin and may take a while to load). It reflects the conventional colours for the Tube lines, and you can select any start station by clicking on the station on the map, or from a dropdown list. According to Mr Carden's page a map of how far away places are in terms of time is known as an "isochronic map" or isochrone.

Though initially the scale shows distance in kilometers, once you pick a start station the map moves around accordingly (it's rather fun to watch that in action), with the scale switching to minutes and concentric circles showing "contour lines" in time terms. Hover over any Tube station on the resulting map and it'll tell you how long it takes to get there from your chosen start station.

It's only a proof of concept so far (crafted using Processing, an environment designed for programming multimedia). The travel times are not fully accurate, with journeys generally appear to take less time than they really do, but at least it gives you a rough idea.

Up steps Nicholas Shanks, who has created a Chronomap database for anyone to input their travel times between Tube and DLR (Docklands Light Railway) stations. Presumably it will then show users the average travel times for specific journeys (and it would be great if maps like Mr Carden's could hook into databases like this). Unfortunately I got a bunch of MySQL errors the last time I looked at that page, but thanks to Mr Shanks for setting that up. Another example of the potential of the Web to harness the collective power of people. I plan to start noting and submitting my own travel times soon.

I'd personally like Mr Carden's map to have a text-only option allowing a user to select both start and end stations from dropdown lists and then have the journey time displayed (e.g. in a popup) - which Mr Shanks's page will do, once there's enough data in it. I guess a combination of the two, with both visual and text information, would be ideal. Why don't London Underground produce an official version of something like this, updated with realtime travel information?

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Technorati Tags: travel, Tube map, London Underground, map, maps, design, usability, travel tips, London, isochronic maps, isochrone, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

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