About the Project

In 2007, Luke came up with the idea to create heat maps of Chicago, showing the transit time from a fixed point to everywhere else in the city. But he had no idea how to go about getting the data.

He asked Max if he had any ideas, and Max, over the span of several months, figured out how to collect the necessary data. We made one map, but then let the project sit around for a while, without doing much.

After about a year, spurred on by the impending CTA transit cuts, we started back in on this more rigorously, and Max perfected his data collection techniques so that we could get data more efficiently. Once we were able to get the data, the maps basically made themselves, though not without many conversations about methodology, and colors, and what have you.

We hope, over the coming months, to make more of these maps, and keep using the code Max developed to do cooler and more useful things. If you have any questions, or ideas for new maps we could make along these lines, please don't hesitate to email Max or Luke.

Finally, special thanks to J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira and Jered Wierzbicki for helping us get this project up and running.

P.S. Both of us are recent graduates of University of Chicago. We love collaborative projects like this one. Check out our websites (Max, and Luke) to see some more stuff we've been working on.