Station Maps - a collection of 3D maps of London Underground/DLR stations | Hacker News Reader

Station Maps - a collection of 3D maps of London Underground/DLR stations

stations.aeracode.org

170 pointsd0ugal34 comments

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Absolutely wonderful. I have been looking for something like this for a long time.

You may want to consider contacting some of the London / tube bloggers for advice or assistance if you haven't already:

http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/3d-tube-map...

http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/3d-london-u...

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/

I suspect they'd be delighted to assist.

Also good to know we have a TFL rep on HN (@mcdowall). Promise I'll go easy ;-)

Haha, I'm only a few weeks in so please do! Though I am working closely with the team that open up the data and look after the mapping options so feel free to ask a question or two.

This is very cool. If you're looking for quick wins, you could probably crank out 5-10 DLR stations in a matter of minutes :-)

Yes, there's a reason I only did one - it would be a bit of a monoculture if I'd done ten or so. It's the same for a lot of the outlying stations on the other lines too.

Great stuff and really interesting - I developed a lot of knowledge of shortcuts on the tube over 20 years of using it. They do like to send you the long way round with the signs! It's nice to visualise some of those shortcuts :)

I'm slightly worried for you however as TFL and the Met seem to be cracking down on any open information about city infrastructure at the moment.

Yes, I find the signage for the Victoria line at King's Cross is particularly bad - they try to send you around to the east end of the platform for some reason, when the west end is normally much closer. This tool is fantastic for visualising what that comparison actually looks like.

I've just started out at TFL and the goal for open data is far from being cracked down upon, in fact it seems they are trying to make more available, give me a shout if there are any particular problems you've experienced and I'm sure I can try and help out.

Under license that is...

Well the service that people have in spy movies where they can instantly access an infinitely zoomable 3D cad model of the entire building - that would be nice ;-)

Hey nice work. I was at Bank station yesterday and was thinking "what's the quickest way from W+C line to the central line?" either "follow the signs" or "up the travelator and down the escalator".. I was resorting to having to time it ! Now countdown before this is branded as a terrorist accessory !!

I agree that this is useful, especially if you are disabled, but it is just a matter of time before "terrorism" is cited as a reason to take it down.

As someone who doesn't know the London tube stations I was wondering what could be a useful application for this map but these comments give me some idea.

Regarding what others have said about this being branded a "terrorist surveillance tool" (highly likely in current climate) - would be amazing if the the code behind this could be released open-source on GitHub, so that it's preserved for a happy day when art isn't censored for 'security'...

Would that be possible?

It's already there: https://github.com/andrewgodwin/stations

Sorry to criticise but it wasn't what I expected. I wanted to see the pedestrian tubes I used to walk down as a kid represented, as tubes. To see them as flat walk-ways doesn't give the same impression.

That said, would be nice to see it expand and perhaps even join up with plots of the train tunnels too.

Andrew, some good and bad news...

Good news - The team loved the implementation, especially the way it rendered on mobile for the smaller stations. They also raised some opportunities for development, such as hints of which carriage to use for travellers carrying large luggage or with accessibility problems.

Now the bad news, if you are going to want to access all the CAD station layout diagrams, 360 Virtual tours or Network / Premises photos you will need to fill in an FOI request.

Give me a shout if you want me to point you in the right direction for the best person for the FOI (save you walking up and down the platforms!). I can't however guarantee access to the information due to the obvious security but its worth you applying.

Ah, that's at least some good news. It was a little inspired by the diagrams at Green Park of the lifts there, so accessibility might be a good idea.

I'd appreciate any FOI advice - might be best if you contact me directly? Email is on my page at aeracode.org/about/

Got it, will drop you a mail.

Great one. I would love to have something like this for Hamburg, Germany as well. Or for the sake of [insert preferred deity here] for every city I have/want to travel to. Imagine sitting in the tube, watching the station you have to change on your smartphone and being able to find the shortest way.

Would be great.

One idea though: Imagine, you could show the normal start/end of a train on these maps, than you could decide beforehand, where in the train to sit, to reach the ideal exit.

This is great, Victoria would be an interesting one to try!. I'll pass this on to my colleague who looks over all our mapping, he'll really like this! (Note : I work for TFL Online).

Very cool. Would love that as a mobile app! This image[1] of Bank makes for an interesting comparison, and shows how close you've got it. Even the viewing angle is the same as the starting view in your 3D model...

[1]http://www.flickr.com/photos/anniemole/6906967990/lightbox/

This is awesome!

Besides the obvious value of what this is, I absolutely love that it works in IE. Sooo many web sites just shut the door, and yet this one degrades as it should* when using a browser without WebGL.

I can actually email a link of this to my dad (runs IE9) and say "how cool is THAT"!

* Pan/tilt work ace, and rendering is perfect.

This is awesome. I'm impressed at how smooth it is even without WebGL (Canvas mode).

One issue I'm noticing is that the cursor target zones for the "tooltip" labels are a bit off (for me at least). As in, if I want to see the label for a lift, I need to place my cursor a bit to the left of it.

This is very nice! I could use this for Tokyo... some of those stations are a good 15 minute walk.

Excellent stuff, well done! I might be a bit biased because I'm fascinated by subway systems though... :)

Please, for the love of the web, implement browser history management so that I can use my back button.

I know - sorry about that. The JS is a bit hacked together! I want to get some decent linkable URLs for stations too at some point.

EDIT: Added it in, back button works as you'd expect now.

Clicking the main link still takes me from http://stations.aeracode.org/ to http://stations.aeracode.org/#, making it impossible to go back to hacker news.

Which browser? Fine in Chrome

I fixed that just after you posted the comment, I think.

We're you the person that also made those last.fm posters? If so props to you.

Yep, that was me - thanks!

tip of the hat to you

http://uploadphotos.co/images/99764525033806155819.png

Very impressive - especially your from-memory reconstruction of Walthamstow Central. Pretty accurate!

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