Hello Real-Time Mash-up Map of the London Tube

If you ever wanted to know exactly how which part of New Oxford Street that Central line tube train was under, you now can now find it out, more or less. A Real-Time mash-up superimposing Transport for London data on a Google Maps page, shows tubes in almost real-time as they travel about under the ground. Matthew Somerville, also known for mapping the UK’s trains.. here.. made the mash-up as part of the Guardian sponsored Science HackDay. The yellow markers are stations, the slowly moving red ones are trains.

Apart from some naming/location issues it’s pretty much real-time accurate.

Practical use? err, well it might be interesting. Other hacks from the day included one aimed at kids called How Fast am I? which sort of mixes up personal data with Wikipedia entries.

You enter a figure – a height, speed, distance or time and it tells you how much smaller you are than Mount Everest, or slower than a rocket launch or faster than the growth of a bamboo. A nice discovery tool for Wikipedia articles.