Open Access

Michael Burch, Yves Staudt, Sina FrommerORCiD, Janis Uttenweiler, Peter Grupp, Steffen Hähnle, Josia Scheytt, Uwe KloosORCiD

• Public transport maps are typically designed in a way to support route finding tasks for passengers while they also provide an overview about stations, metro lines, and city-specific attractions. Most of those maps are designed as a static representation, maybe placed in a metro station or printed in a travel guide. In this paper we describe a dynamic, interactive public transport map visualization enhanced by additional views for the dynamic passenger data on different levels of temporal granularity. Moreover, we also allow extra statistical information in form of density plots, calendar-based visualizations, and line graphs. All this information is linked to the contextual metro map to give a viewer insights into the relations between time points and typical routes taken by the passengers. We illustrate the usefulness of our interactive visualization by applying it to the railway system of Hamburg in Germany while also taking into account the extra passenger data. As another indication for the usefulness of the interactively enhanced metro maps we conducted a user experiment with 20 participants.