This London ‘Heartbeat’ Map Shows You The Busiest Times On The Tube

Annabel Usher • 16 September, 2016

The London underground makes up the heartstrings of the city, beating together to keep us Londoners alive and pump us around the city like oxygen around England’s heart… Yeah, we can be poetic too! Buuuuuut let’s not get ahead of ourselves… We’re not using this heart metaphor to glorify or excuse the unbelievable annoyance that is the underground, but we do have something to show you that might make your daily commute a little less heartbreaking.

A clever clogs at the UCL research team Oliver O’Brien has taken data collected by TFL to create an incredible visualisation of the amount of people on the tube at one time, which will hopefully help you avoid those busy times. This wonderful interactive map has been called the ‘Tube Heartbeat,’ (is our poetic heartstrings metaphor beginning to make more sense now?!)

This map divides time into 15 minute intervals and perhaps the most impressive thing is that you can select individual tube lines and view the peak times between specific interchanges on that line – O’Brien definitely seems to be on the right track (hehe) to relieving tube stress – and let’s be honest, this moving colourful map just looks really bloody cool as well.

If you wanna try to avoid the tube at those busiest of times then check out the full visualisation of London’s heartbeat map in all it’s throbbing, veiny glory here. (We only realised how crude this sounded after typing it, we swear).

Feature Image: [londonist]

Tags: interactive, map, tube