How to Create a Biking Travel Time Heatmap

Jonathan Lansley has written up an interesting tutorial about how he created the video above. The video animates a heatmap of Boston travel times by bike and by public transit from one specific location.

Jonathan used the Google Maps API to retrieve the travel times at different times of the day for both bike journeys and journeys by public transit. Using the data he then created the animated heat map that displays the travel times throughout one day.

A Stamen Maps designed OpenStreetMap was used for the final map but the Google Maps API Styled Maps feature could also be used to create the black and white map tiles needed as the base of the heatmap.

The resulting video is very impressive. Hopefully the tutorial will lead to some more examples, comparing travel times in other cities around the world.