{"id":20805,"date":"2020-11-11T19:28:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-12T00:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=20805"},"modified":"2020-11-12T14:15:04","modified_gmt":"2020-11-12T19:15:04","slug":"train-stations-in-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/labs\/train-stations-in-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Train Stations in Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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INTRODUCTION & INSPIRATION<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The public transport infrastructure in Europe is convenient for travel from one country to another. As an efficient and economical way for passengers to organize the route it also provides congestion reduction and health-harming emissions in urban areas. One of the cleanest and energy-efficient public transportation vehicles is trains which also allows passengers to avoid traffic and quickly reach your destination. The idea of creating the train stations chain and their proximity across European countries was inspired by an aspiration to provide the readers with information about routes availability and strongly encourages the use of public transport as an environmentally friendly way of transportation. As an inspiration, I used winter’s cold austerity map<\/a> from mapbox.com<\/a> website and some other design examples from pinterest.com<\/a> such as Blue-green world map<\/a> and Uber map visualization<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PROCESS & MATERIALS<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Train Stations in Europe<\/a> dataset from Kaggle.com<\/a> was used as a data source to create a map. This dataset contained the names, coordinates, and basic properties of more than 36K train stations in Europe. The data also contained a few train stations in the European parts of Russia and Turkey, as well as a small number of stations in the African country of Morocco. I downloaded the CSV dataset, cleaned it from rows missing latitude and longitude information (about 5% of all stations had no coordinates) which is crucial for building a map. Then the dataset was uploaded to Carto<\/a>, the open-source spatial analytics software. Two layers were used to build the map: train stations’ coordinates and European countries. To design the map green color tones were used to show the level of train stations’ intensity by value. Yellow (points) was chosen as a contrast color to demonstrate the specific location of each station. Borders between countries are white with lowered transparency to have a clearer understanding of where the countries are. I also added the legend that shows what colors mean and two widgets that help to filter search results by train station name or country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

RESULTS <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, we got the map where green color saturation shows train stations’ intensity. We can see that France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Andorra, Spain, and the United Kingdom have the highest number of stations. Countries located closer to the east have lower numbers of stations. Latvia, Moldova, Albania have the lowest number of stations. This might be related to the number of landmarks and popularity for travelers. The highest train stations’ intensity is concentrated in central and western Europe.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Link to interactive map<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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