Sunday, August 03, 2014

A New Type of Tourist Map


Taxi Stockholm has created a new kind of tourist map. A map which uses data from millions of taxi trips taken in Stockholm to identify the city's favorite destinations.

Taxi Trails has taken the data from all of Stockholm's GPS enabled cabs and used the Google Maps API to create a heat-map of taxi destinations in the Swedish capital. Taxi Stockholm believe that this heat-map is not only a beautiful data visualization but it can also be useful for tourists visiting the city.

The idea of visualizing taxi destinations on a map isn't new. For example we've recently seen a number of mapped visualizations of New York taxi data. For example, Hubcab is is a great map of New York taxi data, visualizing the destinations and pick-up points of 170 million taxi trips.

Taxi Stockholm's differs from Hubcab however in that it uses the taxi data as a starting point to discover the secrets of the city. If you are visiting Stockholm for the first time you can use the map to find popular hot-spots in the city.

For example, if you are looking for somewhere to go on a Saturday night, you can refine the map to show the most popular destinations for Stockholm cabs in the evening at the weekend. You can then zoom in on a hot-spot on the map and select the 'Explore this area' option. This will then drop markers on the map showing you bars and restaurants in the area. You can even scope out the area for yourself using Street View to see if look likes a good place to visit.

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