Nokia's Here LivingCities maps visualises traffic in Mumbai and other cities

Nokia's Here location services unit in collaboration with CartoDB, a cloud based mapping, analysis and visualization engine, has released a web project called Living Cities that visualises traffic in a time-lapsed format over the course of 24 hours, in five different global cities, namely, Mumbai, London, Chicago, Rome and Helsinki.

GigaOM reports that the project anonymised data collected by the Here platform and shared it with CartoDB which then visualised traffic movement over a period of one month. In Mumbai, it covered 18 million people, 1.8 million vehicles and 1900 km of roads.

The LivingCities map offers two zoom levels giving a close view of major roads and intersections, and points of interest, with the flow of traffic being visualised through moving white light. The map also offers sounds experienced on the roads of the city  and statistics and trivia related to the city, its points of interest and traffic patterns that can be shared on Facebook and Twitter. The map features a slider for time to toggle view across 24 hours. The colours of the map turn bright and dark inline with the time depicting the outside conditions.

According to Nokia, the data behind this visualisation is continuously collected by Here through connected devices such as Nokia mobile phones, the Here web apps and in-car navigators powered by Here. It clarifies that no personal data is collected and that it collects small data changes to find out how the traffic is flowing in the city, whether a road is closed, or a new road has opened, among others.

The traffic map of Mumbai shows how traffic is consistently heavy during a large part of the day though the average speed increases after 8:30pm and peaks at late hours, which is in contrast to traffic in Helsinki where traffic reduces considerably after evening.

The map is essentially an attempt to encourage developers to take a look at data APIs offered by Here maps to develop their own city visualisations, according to Nokia. If deployed at a large scale, the map could help governments and enterprises in planning the city better and placing establishments depending on the flow of traffic.