The Camden Town tube station, one of the busiest in the London underground system. Photo by zer0_pt.

TheCityFix discovered what quite possibly could be the world’s coolest transport-related master’s thesis project-recap video.

The recent debut of the BRT in Action Newsletter, published by Santiago, Chile’s Centre of Excellence for Bus Rapid Transit, included a link to Jay Gordon’s ambitious visualization of data gathered on commuter transit patterns by bus and rail in the course of one day in greater London. The map is color coded so that blue represents passengers at home or at their starting point; green indicates they are traveling in the system; and red means they are transferring or in between trips. Check it out:

Gordon explains:

This visualization merges all 16 million daily transactions made on London’s Oyster card [metro pass] with vehicle-location data from the city’s 8,500 buses to infer the travel histories of that day’s 3.1 million Oyster users. After inferring the times and locations of each bus boarding and alighting, bus and rail transactions are combined to reconstruct each cardholder’s daily travel history…By matching Oyster transaction records to data from the iBus vehicle-location system, buses are shown to traverse the street network at their observed speeds, and their brightness reflects the number of passengers on board.