ATLAS / PLATE 003

LONDON IS BIGGER AT MIDNIGHT

Measuring london by travel at different times rather than raw distance.

What shape is London when distance is measured in scheduled minutes?

PLATE 003 / 003

Astronaut photograph ISS010-E-22495; NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Public domain in the United States as NASA material.SOURCE ↗

FINAL P003 coordinates; Greater London boundary derived from Ordnance Survey OpenData; GSHHG/WDBII Thames reference. Greater London source data OpenData / OGL; GSHHG LGPL.

C1 / 01

THE REFERENCE CITY

The experiment starts with ordinary geography. King’s Cross St Pancras is the origin, and each destination begins at its real bearing and distance from that point.

Source: Transport for London Unified API via FINAL FN002 topology. Generated from frozen Atlas assets.

NOTEBOOK REFERENCE

KTo288, August 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported.SOURCE ↗

C2 / 02

THE NETWORK REWRITES NEARNESS

Public transport rewrites nearness. Interchanges, line structure and service patterns mean two places at similar physical distance can sit very differently in travel-time space.

FINAL P003 TfL-derived data. Generated from frozen Atlas assets.

C3 / 03

KEEP THE BEARING, CHANGE THE RADIUS

For every destination I keep the geographic bearing from King’s Cross. I then replace geographic radius with an effective radius derived from scheduled journey time. Thus direction stays geographic while distance becomes temporal.

FINAL P003 TfL-derived data. Generated from frozen Atlas assets.

C4 / 04

13:00 VS 23:30

At 23:30 the median effective radius is only 1.67% larger than at 13:00. The local changes are much sharper. Some destinations stretch outward, others remain comparatively resilient, so the city changes shape rather than simply scaling up.

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NEXT PLATE001 — THE WALKING RIVER →

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