A brief glimpse of the Bike Map
So much time talking about the bike map, so little time showing what I’ve actually been working on. Usually it’s the other way around: all showing, no talking. I thought I might wet the collective hydrostat, prior to it’s ultimate aid of more thorough public digestion, with something that my more tiresome colleagues might call an image which conveys brand equity.
Soothing or perhaps jarring colours, a sense of immediate tangibility, not less than a touch of fetishism. The object or better it’s image becomes a site of worship. White-balance is of the utmost importance. Perhaps I’ve been in DAAP too long already today? Perhaps I shouldn’t work in this library any more.
But just look at that underscoring shadow!
On a less sarcastic tone, I’ve finally finished a task of which I’m rightly proud, which no one knew I was doing: detecting dead-ends successfully after a four day expedition into graph theory. Robert Tarjan is the guy to thank here, and the Wikipedia editors who tediously provided a pseudo-code implementation of his algorithm for the detection of strongly connected network components. The bike map will emphasize only one strongly connected network component, the biggest one, and all the rest will be damned to transparency!
Or more simply, the idea is to deemphasize streets which don’t go anywhere. There are a surprising number of them!
The goal right now is to have the map on the presses by the end of July, to be distributed near the end of August when I return from vacation. I’ve got a little surveying and data entry left for me in the days ahead, and then the big crunch as I finalize the layout and systematically double-check important features.
Incredible work. Found out about your bike map on Reddit.
[…] look better on paper. You can get a bit closer to seeing the actual color of the map by looking at this image. Once I get back home and back to my desktop computer, I’ll be able to work on an RGB […]