Auto-generating maps
I’m working on scaling up the data analysis from the thesis, and I’m making some good progress, thanks to Folium. This is a really cool package for creating Leaflet.js maps from Python data, and writing them out to JSON, which means they can be used as interactive web maps. Or, what I’m going to be doing more of is grabbing the JSON/HTML output with PhantomJS and writing them out to image files, like the one included here (from Columbus, OH). This is one of the coolest-looking visualizations so far: census tracts are colored by percentage of workers with a commute less than 20 minutes (ACS 2015), and road segments are colored by access to jobs, attenuated by segment grade and circuity. Dedicated bike infrastructure (as reported by OpenStreetMaps) is colored in green.
I’m pretty close to being able to run this on an arbitrary number of cities: just need to make the code a little more robust.
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What’s with the census tracts that are almost black, in the NE quadrant? That color is not in the scale on the top right.
You can’t see it that well at this scale (and you’re right, my code wasn’t putting it in the legend at the time that I generated this image), but there are two layers going on here. The scale at the top right is the number of workers in the census tract with commute < 20 minutes (self-reported from ACS), On top of that, there is a coloring for each road segment, which is an attempt at a "bike commuting usefulness" heat map score based on access to jobs along the street network, segment circuity (how straight the road is), and average grade. Darker is more useful.