For 9 years people have been able to upload GPS traces to OpenStreetMap and now the data is being made available for people to map. Most of the traces appear to have come from people who are driving, although other modes are definitely represented. The data is apparently very useful for being able to map roads and adjust maps where the map doesn’t match aerial imagery. The data has been visualised by mapbox by using colour depending on the direction of the trace this is as per below.

The direction works by comparing the angle between each point in the GPS track and the one that follows it. If the track says that a person was in one location and then the next point in the track is due east of there, the line between the two is colored red.

The results create some extremely beautiful maps of transport systems. Here the central city of Auckland where a few things that stand out. The motorway network and Fanshawe St show up really strongly, and to a lesser extend so do Quay St, Symonds St and Hobson St. There is an explosion of squiggly lines around the Skytower and lots of them up and down Queen St and Albert St which I’m guessing represent lots of people walking.

Mapbox Visualisation Auckland

The amount of data available for Auckland pales in comparison to that of Europe however so I’d suggest using the map on this link to go and view it.

H/T to The Atlantic Cities

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10 comments

  1. This and / or a larger version showing some of the suburbs and ship movements, would make a great T Shirt. Where can I get high-res versions of these pics in JPEG, TIFF or PNG format?

    1. That’s very weird, and there are a lot that are similar around the country. I wonder if this might be an area where GPS is a bit spotty because of hills or dense bush or something. And if you get spot positions rather than continuous positions, then instead of it mapping a track then it joins up the spots with a straight line which makes the fan-looking shapes?

      If you have a look at Kapiti Island, there are what looks like walking tracks at the north and south ends of the islands, but some absolutely straight lines joining up random points across what is impassable hilly bush. I think it might be the same thing.

  2. I downloaded an app called Tracks, thinking it would be useful to log my bike commuting trips during the day. Tried it a few times but I gave up when a track I did had me going *through* buildings on lower Queen St when I was riding along Queen St. A wiggly line going through a few of the buildings… I couldn’t work it out.

    1. GPS, being originally designed for ships and aircraft, is not that great when you have a constrained view of the sky, such as on Queen Street. You generally need line-of-sight from half a dozen satellites for best results, so the larger the view of the sky the better your chances.

      Some phones now have the ability to use both American GPS satellites and the Russian GLONASS, which when combined can give better results. But ultimately there’s not a lot of military point in having accurate positioning in the middle of a city – you know where you are! A map’s more useful – unless you are Open Street Map, and you’re trying to actually make a map.

    1. I suspect it’s more a matter of those post-Soviet Russians all being justifiably worried about having evidence in a car accident, and all running dashcams all the time. And if you’re running the GPS anyway, you might as well stick it up on OpenStreetMap.

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