The Transit Maps of the Week

This week saw the release of some interesting mapped visualizations of transit data. For example, Travel By Rail is a a great interactive map and data visualization of intercity rail journeys in Ukraine.

The map allows you to explore the number of outgoing and incoming intercity train journeys for towns and cities across the Ukraine (2014-2015) and provides a number of tools which allow you to explore the data by location and date range.

You can select individual cities on the map to show the intercity rail journeys taken to and from that city. You can also use the graph to select to view only those train journeys taken within a specified date range (either for all cities or for selected individual cities). It is also possible to view only internal train journeys in Ukraine, or journeys between Ukraine and Belarus or Russia, or both internal journeys and journeys taken to and from Belarus & Russia.


Chris Whong's NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life is one of the most impressive mapped visualizations of transit data around. Therefore if you want to map NYC taxi data you have to be aware that the bar is set very high. Michael Fogleman's 2015 Yellow Taxi Trips clears the bar.

This interactive map of over 77 million taxi trips from January to June 2015 allows you to explore the most popular destinations for taxi journeys from any location on Manhattan Island. Click anywhere in Manhattan and you can view a heat map showing the most popular destinations from that spot. The map also includes an hourly frequency graph which shows you the most popular times for taking a yellow taxi from your selected location.

The map was built with Leaflet, d3, jQuery and Bootstrap. The map itself responds impressively quickly. When you click on the map the heat map and hourly frequency chart update with lightning speed.


The first tram line in Vienna was constructed in 1865. This horse driven tram line ran between Schottentor and Hernals. Vienna's U-Bahn subway system didn't appear until over one hundred years later.

You can view the growth of Vienna's public transit system over time on a new interactive map. Zeitlinie is a timeline driven map which shows when Vienna's many tram, train and U-Bahn lines were first opened.

You can use the play button at the bottom of the map to watch an animated history of the growth of Vienna's transit system. Alternatively you can use the timeline slide control to explore the extent of the transit system in Vienna for any year from 1865 to 2016.

The map was made with the Leaflet mapping platform and uses the Leaflet.timeline plugin to add the transit lines to the map by date.