Monthly Visualisations: A Summary Blog

Way back in February, before pandemic was in our everyday vocab, the product and marketing team at Basemap pledged to give you a new visualisation blog every month until the end of the year. Made slightly more challenging by the only open Points Of Interests being supermarkets and hospitals – neither are very glamorous starting points.

1 Contours and Lines

To kick-start the project, we looked at a casual trip to the Roman Baths. Utilising two Basemap software applications: TRACC and Highways Analyst, we produced this drive time contour combined with the road speed on the different road links throughout the journey.

Read the full blog here.

2 Contours and Digital Elevation

Yeah okay, it might say that cycle ride is half an hour – but with that hill?!
This blog took into consideration the elevation of the route and the impact that would have on cycling speed.

Read the full blog here.

3 A walking in the park: Greenspace Accessibility

Inspired by a student’s research using TRACC, March’s visualization looked at how easy it is to get to a greenspace in Birmingham.

Read the full blog here.

4 Road speed comparison GIFs.

I’m sure we all remember the roads during the first lockdown. Empty.

But what does that do to the data? Thankfully Basemap answered that question for you in the form of GIFs. Here are before and during snapshots of the road speeds in 5 different cities in the UK.

Read the full blog here.

5 24-hour accessibility to A&E in Leeds.

Murphy’s law states that if you do have an accident or emergency your car is at the mechanics and you will have just missed the last bus of the night. But, How likely is that? In June we looked at the accessibility using public transport to Leeds A&E over a 24-hour period.

Read the full blog here.

6 3 in 1 from a thematic map.

In July we were feeling rather generous with our visulisation blogs, and decided to give you a three-in-one blog. Showing multiple ways the same dataset can be shown.

Read the full blog here.

7 Milton Keynes road network through the years

You know that bittersweet feeling when the council announce a change to the roads, you know your life will be made much easier… in 5-10 years, but for now the most useful road link will be blocked? Well, we put that to the test, looking at how much the Milton Keynes road network evolved over the past 10 years.

Read the full blog here.

8 Horsepower in the 1700s Vs Now

Sometimes driving around London it feels as though you would go faster if you walked, but we often forget the vast amount of technological development that has happened to get us to the point that 20pmh feels slow. We looked at what London accessibility would have been like before cars – we even rebuilt the 1700s road network in TRACC!

Read the full blog here.

9 Haunted Roads Trips

This year Trick Or Treating and Halloween house parties were well and truly off the table – so what else but to drive round the country going to haunted locations. Using our EVRouting software we input the postcodes of the most haunted locations in the UK and created 4 terrifying trips.

Read the full blog here.

10 Contour on a Road Network and Census Accessibility Data

Typically with an accessibility calculation, TRACC provides a contour and a table of corresponding census accessibility data. This month, an all in one method shows the contour on the road network with different points indication the number of residents around that road link.

Read the full blog here.

11 How long is your commute REALLY?

So we all know that as the crow flies isn’t accurate and we would much prefer to get straight to work (and more importantly, back home) than go round the houses and sit in traffic. But how different is it really? We used TRACC to show the real journey times vs the one the census data told us about.

Read the full blog here.

12 Coming up next year: UK 20 minutes cities

How long would it take you to get to your local doctors? Or supermarket? Or to work? City planners are aiming to get these times under 20 minutes, for everyone, to every amenity. Every month of 2021 we’ll be assessing how well the biggest cities in the UK measure up to the 20-minute goal.

First one under the spotlight… Belfast.