Here is a neat tool (created by Benjamin Td) that allows you to quickly see how far you can travel in Europe by rail in 5 hours. The way it works is that you just hover over a train station and then the relevant isochrone will show up. Above is what that looks like for Paris' Gare de Lyon, which has one of if not the largest catchment areas from what I can tell after playing around with the tool for a few minutes. The data being used to power this map is from Deutsche Bahn. And if there's a transfer on any of the routes, the tool assumes you can make that happen within 20 minutes, which may or may not be realistic. Regardless, it's fascinating to see just how connected (or disconnected) some cities are. It's also a shameful reminder that a North American version wouldn't be nearly as impressive.

I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?

Google collects this data from of our phones.

It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).

So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.

I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.

The last thing you probably need at this point is another webinar. But this one could actually be interesting. On May 29th, 2020 at 9:00 AM eastern, the Senseable City Lab at MIT is hosting one called, Tracking epidemics in cities: urban environments and the insights they provide into disease. The Senseable City Lab has previously looked at how sewage could be mined for real-time information about an urban population, revealing things like eating habits, genetic tendencies, drug consumption, and -- yes -- contagious diseases. In this webinar, SCL plans to pickup on this last point, as well as discuss how mobile phone patterns can help to inform epidemiological studies. If you'd like to register, click here.

Image: SCL

Here is a neat tool (created by Benjamin Td) that allows you to quickly see how far you can travel in Europe by rail in 5 hours. The way it works is that you just hover over a train station and then the relevant isochrone will show up. Above is what that looks like for Paris' Gare de Lyon, which has one of if not the largest catchment areas from what I can tell after playing around with the tool for a few minutes. The data being used to power this map is from Deutsche Bahn. And if there's a transfer on any of the routes, the tool assumes you can make that happen within 20 minutes, which may or may not be realistic. Regardless, it's fascinating to see just how connected (or disconnected) some cities are. It's also a shameful reminder that a North American version wouldn't be nearly as impressive.

I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?

Google collects this data from of our phones.

It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).

So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.

I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.

The last thing you probably need at this point is another webinar. But this one could actually be interesting. On May 29th, 2020 at 9:00 AM eastern, the Senseable City Lab at MIT is hosting one called, Tracking epidemics in cities: urban environments and the insights they provide into disease. The Senseable City Lab has previously looked at how sewage could be mined for real-time information about an urban population, revealing things like eating habits, genetic tendencies, drug consumption, and -- yes -- contagious diseases. In this webinar, SCL plans to pickup on this last point, as well as discuss how mobile phone patterns can help to inform epidemiological studies. If you'd like to register, click here.

Image: SCL