A Single Day on the London Tube, Condensed Into 2 Minutes

Have you ever spent your commute on public transit feeling not unlike a ping pong ball, bouncing from line to line between bodies, backpacks and unending escalators? A new data visualization from a coder named Will Gallia shows commuters working their way through a day in the life of London’s Tube as exactly that: busy little pixels of commuting energy.

Gallia created his visualization with London Underground data from a single day in 2009. He used information from a 5 percent sample of Oyster card journeys to determine where each of roughly 560,000 travelers’ trips began and ended. (The BBC reported last year that 3.5 million Brits take the Tube every day.) He then wrote a routing algorithm to estimate which lines these commuters used on their journeys. Finally, he superimposed these trips on the map of London’s Underground system, allowing the pixelated bodies of his passengers to illuminate the daily ebbs and flows of the Tube.