Hypothetical Taxi Movements in MMla
Sharing with you this personal project I’ve been working on with the help of my friend Ed. Recently, I’ve been learning JavaScript, D3, and Leaflet.
Here, I show the visualization of hypothetical taxi trips I created (from data generation to viz). The visualization was mostly coded by Ed, which I revised a bit (mostly for the style). All the points (origin and destination) are, of course, arbitrary. The trips were all randomly generated, in both space (from NAIA Terminal 2 to some hotel/hostel/apartment in Metro Manila) and time.
On the synthetic data generation, below I share the steps I took. I wrote all necessary scripts in Python.
- Write code that parses through OpenStreetMap and identifies all hotels/hostels/motels/apartments in Metro Manila.
- Write code that queries MapQuest (via its public API) for directions from NAIA terminal 2 to all identified buildings/amenities (from item 1).
- Write code that creates a geojson file that contains (randomly generated) origin-destination pairs, routes (LineString), pick-up times, and drop-off times. The geojson file is then fed to the viz platform.
Acknowledgement
The visualization is inspired by ImageWork’s NYC holiday taxi viz, which was inspired by Chris Wong’s NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life. Both have provided their code (at least part of them) for those who are interested in implementing the same viz. Ed and I studied their implementations.
