Shortest Path First
When a major transport link changes in a city, the topology of the city’s links changes like a dynamic routing protocol in a network. Areas which were previously hard to reach suddenly become accessible at very low cost (ie. time) to the user.
The London travel times map (http://stamen.com/clients/mysociety) was originally made in 2006 by the late Chris Lightfoot, and the work lives on as a “London 2012 Olympic Stadium in Stratford, East London” travel times map.
Far from being a calculated crow-flies radius from your start point, the time to reach each area of the map is tailored to your individual location, calculated and displayed as contours. As the slider moves it masks the areas of the map which are no longer accessible in the time given. The end result is that you can accurately estimate travel time between two points, and perhaps use it to decide where to live.
Although this is a very clever new approach to least-time routing, I don’t think most people see the city as contours when they calculate their commute. This may be because nobody’s really mapped the city in travel-time contours before, or it may be that we see the world as links to traverse.
When a new line opens people very quickly change their cognitive map of the city. In the same way that a planned engineering closure will cause a temporary recalculation of a night out, people in a city calculate whether this new link benefits their daily commute, and then flow across it.
At some point it will become part of the fabric and the city’s inhabitants consider living somewhere previously inaccessible. The “here be dragons” parts of the map will open up to them. This has the side-effect of changing the value of housing and economic makeup of an area, a process called gentrification. Since the opening of the East London Line extension Canary Wharf and Docklands is a few minutes away from Southeast London. There’s likely to be a rise in the property prices and a change of dynamics in New Cross and Dalston and, sure enough, speculators have already bought property there.
Maybe I spent too long north of the river, but I’d claim that London Underground is the preferred method of transport for the uninitiated, if only because the map is so beautifully presented that it’s how many Londoners see the city’s shape. I’d even go so far as to suggest that colouring in the overground rail network would lure people into it and open up a previously inaccessible South London. A guerilla campaign with a few felt tips could change years of unsuccessful transport plans. With this in mind it seems a shame that the Crossrail project gets such ugly maps on its website.
When Crossrail opens, hopefully in 2017, the topology of London will once again change. The graphic at the top of this article is an “artist’s impression” of the Crossrail map, but instead rendered as a Beckian tube line. Using contemporary mapping language suggests the line has already been completed and updates the topology inside your head. It allows you to dream of they day when you can step into a new station at Tottenham Court Road and be accelerated to Slough before you’d even have got a seat on a First Great Western fart cart at Paddington.
The tunnel is not merely another section of underground, though. As a high-speed simplified underground system it has the effect of a vortex or wormhole, warping space (time) as the slow procession of escalators and ticket barriers flit somewhere above your head and you’re extruded from Central London under the once-impossibly-modern Westway and Trellick Tower. Sadly, they didn’t burrow under Slough.
