Cool New Maps Illustrate a Day of Bus Travel Across Boston, by Speed

Transit data visualizations got a lot more interesting with the advent of real-time information. Now, we can tell not just where bus stops are located, or how often trains are scheduled on a given line. Now in many cities, time-stamped, geo-referenced data reveal exactly where a given bus was located at a particular time... and then another time just a few minutes later. And this means that we can clock the metric that matters most to many commuters: speed.

The above map, created by Andy Woodruff of the great cartography blog Bostonography, illustrates a single day's worth of bus travel across Boston, by speed. Each little line on this map represents one bus (tracked as the crow flies between data points, not along its actual route), with red showing speeds of less than 10 miles an hour, yellow of 10-25 miles per hour, and green faster than that: