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Data Visualization: Key Routes and Communities In London's Bike Rental Network
An anonymous reader writes to this article about a series of visualizations built from London bike rental data. "My favourite is the second map, it shows the main routes that exist between rental areas, coloured according to the local communities that exist in the network. So you can see the major flows of bike traffic within the city, which are mostly between major railway stations and work destinations. You can also see how the different local networks relate to each other — Hyde Park is its own little world, for example, while the networks around Kings Cross, Waterloo, and Liverpool Street are far more interconnected." (Several more just-as-interesting maps here, too. Wish every city had an interface to this kind of data, would make interesting reading for visitors as well as for locals.)
Here's something similar that covers more areas... a heat map of Strava rides:
http://raceshape.com/heatmap/
People will concentrate where more people already are. The location of bike facilities and support infrastructure like bike paths will dominate the "flow". It's not really all that insightful or interesting for that matter.
People don't innately know where other cyclists are, or where the most popular bike routes are, so maps that show where other people ride can be useful to find the best route to where they're going. "Official" bike routes aren't always the best route.
I tend to think it's the other way around. People are going to cycle to the destination they are going. They are mostly not going to simply follow cycle routes where-ever they happen to go. Cycle routes should be built to cover the most popular journeys. That is the use of research like this.