Processing software

Pedro Miguel Cruz, Penousal Machado, and João Bicker mapped the GPS coordinates and velocities of 1,534 taxis circulating throughout Lisbon over one month, using data provided by MIT Portugal’s CityMotion project, and then condensed the data into an animation representing an average single day to produce a dynamic visualization of the city’s traffic. Coordinates and velocities are grouped by second and coded by color; thickness and color correspond to traffic intensity, with warm colors indicating sluggish traffic and cool colors indicating traffic moving quickly, making it is easy to spot areas likely to be bottlenecked. As a novel way of expressing useful everyday information, the project suggests applications for future mobile decision-making technology and presents an elegant image of the city and transport network as a pulsating protozoan organism—with a metabolism that shifts depending on the time of day.