Isochrone Tokyo

Tokyo has one of the most comprehensive public transit systems in the world. Curtis Fenner has built an isochrone map that allows you to see where you can travel in the city by train in a given time.

The purpose of the map is to help people make crucial decisions about where to live by visualizing real-world commute times. It effectively achieves this by not only showing the reach of the entire network but also highlighting areas that are surprisingly difficult to get to, revealing what Curtis calls "train deserts" -pockets in the city that are more than a ten-minute walk from a station.

Users can input a single destination into the map How Far Can Trains Take Me in Tokyo? to see all the areas reachable within a specified commute time. The map also has a feature that allows for the addition of multiple destinations. When more than one destination is entered, the map blends the travel times, which can be useful for planning a meeting spot or finding a place to live that optimizes the commutes for multiple people. The settings panel also allows users to adjust the maximum door-to-door commute time and the maximum walk time to a station.

Tokyo has around 100 different transit lines and more than a dozen different train operators. These private operators typically do not publish their schedules in an easily usable format, which means most maps simply can't account for them. This map, however, tackles this challenge head-on by using a combination of web scraping and estimation to fill in the data gaps, resulting in a more complete travel time map of the city.

If you are interested in exploring an isochrone map of your city then you might find one under the Maps Mania isochrone tag.

Subway Specs - Part III

Tokyo's Shinjuku Station is the world's busiest train station. Its is used by over 3.5 million passengers every day. To cope with that amount of traffic the station has to be very big. It has 35 platforms, while another 17 platforms can be accessed through hallways to 5 directly connected stations without traveling outside.

With over 35 platforms and over 200 station exits it can be easy to get lost in Shinjuku Station. If you need a little help finding your way then Shinjuku Station Indoor, an impressive new 3D map of the station (created using three.js), may be of some help.

You may also enjoy Tomoyuki Tanaka's truly impressive blueprint plan of Shinjuku Station.

If you are a fan of 3D plans of train stations then you will probably love the work of Albert Guillaumes Marcer, who is single-handedly mapping the subway stations of the world. So far his Stations and Transfers website features well over 800 3D maps of subway stations in cities all over the globe.

Also See

X-Ray Area Maps - New York architect Candy Chan's 3D plans of New York subway stations

Ian Visits - Transport for London's axonometric diagrams for 120 London Underground stations.

Tokyo Live

Tokyo Live is an amazing real-time animated map of the trains on Tokyo's rapid transit and metro networks. The map allows you to track and watch in real-time all of Tokyo's trains as they navigate and move around the city. All on top of an impressive 3D map of Tokyo.

I can't help thinking that Tokyo Live was probably inspired by the equally impressive Mini Tokyo 3D, which is a 3D animated map of Tokyo's overground and underground transit networks. One of the main differences between the two maps is that Tokyo Live uses 3D train models rather than the stylized colored blocks used by Mini Tokyo 3D.

Mini Tokyo 3D

Tokyo Live includes a drop-down menu which allows you to select any Tokyo transit line. This opens a single line map of the line's stations with all the trains shown moving along the line. You can select any station on this line to center the main 3D map on the chosen station. You can also click on any of the individual trains to center the map on that train and to track its movement in real-time around Tokyo.

Tokyo Live works by using train timetables from the Public Transportation Open Data Center for Tokyo Metro coupled with real-time transit feeds. The 3D building data on the map uses the scene layer of Tokyo buildings from Esri Japan.

If you are impressed by Tokyo Live and Mini Tokyo 3D then you should also have a look at some of the other live subway maps listed in the post The Best Real-Time Subway Maps.

Mini Tokyo

Mini Tokyo 3D is a live real-time map of Tokyo's public transit system. The map shows the live position of Tokyo's trains in 3D as they move around the city.

Mini Tokyo has two different map views. If you press the eye icon button you can switch between the 'underground' (pictured above) and 'overground' layers. The underground mode highlights the city's subway system with colored subway lines on top of a dark base map. In this mode the overground trains are shown faded out on the map. The overground mode shows all the city's buildings in 3D. In this mode all the subway trains are shown faded out as they move around under the city and all of Tokyo's overground trains are shown in full color.

If you hover over a train on the map you can view details about its number and when it will arrive at its next stop. If you double click on a train you can center the map on the train and the map will track the train as it moves around the city.

A Glimpse into Tokyo's Past

Retroscope is a fascinating insight into Tokyo's history glimpsed through historical aerial views of the city. This interactive map presents a collection of aerial views of the city dating back to 1945.

The map uses a magnifying lens control to allow you to view historical aerial imagery of Tokyo overlaid on a modern map of the city. You can also select to view a vintage 1880 map of Tokyo overlaid on the modern map.

One of the interesting details that the map reveals is the historical canal network in Ginza. The canals can be clearly seen in the 1880 map and the 1945 aerial imagery. However by the time of the 1961 aerial imagery nearly all the canals have disappeared from the city.

The magnifying glass effect used in Retroscope is published on GitHub (with no license details). Alternatively you can use the Leaflet.MagnifyingGlass plugin (available under a MIT license) to create a similar effect on a Leaflet.js map.