Public transit maps are a testament to the power of visual communication. They reduce the task of navigating hundreds or even thousands of miles of transport routes to simply glancing at an image. However, understanding a city’s transit frequency – how often the trains and buses run along those routes – is not nearly as easy, and typically requires scanning through pages of timetables.
Guardian Cities reports on TransitFlow, Columbia University grad student Will Geary's toolset that helps visualise public transit routes and frequencies in cities. Using open-source programmes, Geary created TransitFlow to ease this visualisation. “Timetables provide information about frequency but can be overwhelming, unintuitive and lacking geographic context,” he states.
The Guardian article includes a number of examples, as does Geary's Vimeo account.