Monday, January 18, 2016

Moscow's Animated Metro Passenger Map


The Moscow Metro wi-fi network is available to passengers both in station and on journey while aboard the city's metro trains. This means that Maxima Telecom, the operators of the wi-fi network, are able to track individual users as they move about the metro system.

Many metro networks around the world have adopted electronic ticketing systems. This means transit authorities now have the ability to analyse passenger movements around metro systems to an unprecedented degree. Most electronic ticketing systems however only allow transit authorities to monitor the start and end points of passenger journeys, when passengers use their electronic tickets to enter and leave the metro transit system. They don't show how passengers have navigated and traveled from point A to point B through the metro system.

By tracking wi-fi users Moscow Metro and Maxima Telecom are able to actually observe how these passengers actually navigate the Moscow metro system. They can observe how passengers travel around the system from the time they connect to the wi-fi network to the time that they disconnect.

Maxima Telecom has released an animated map which shows the movements of passengers connected to Moscow Metro's wi-fi network, over the the course of one day. On an average day the network sees up to 70 TB of internet traffic. The purpose of this map is obviously to promote the success of Moscow Metro's free wi-fi system. Therefore the map makes no attempt to analyse the data being presented.

However the Moscow Metro Wi-fi Map is still a beautiful mapped visualization of Moscow Metro's wi-fi users as they travel around the city.

No comments: