Sadly, my original plan to show the flow of transport around Frankfurt over the course of a day failed due to the extreme lack of availability of timetable data in a halfway reasonable format. So instead, here’s some maps of Frankfurt and the surrounding area made by mucking about with OpenStreetMap data in MapPoint. Enjoy?
Frankfurt places of worship per capita in equal quantiles.
Ever wondered what the most religious part of Frankfurt is? Almost certainly not. But here you go anyway. I’m not sure why Nieder-Eschbach has so many churches. I suppose there’s just not much else worth doing around there.
Brothels and strip clubs.
So apparently one piece of information that OpenStreetMap includes is the location of brothels. You won’t get that from Open Data. Because there weren’t enough to be statistically significant, I’ve combined a few categories together to get a general red-light district calculation. SHOCKINGLY, Bahnhofsviertel is by far the leader with 12 data points. Who’d have thought Kaiserstraße was some kind of red-light district?!
The red dot in the middle, incidentally, is the barycentre – the centre of mass – for the Rhein-Main sex industry. If each brothel and strip club was on its own little asteroid, that’s the point they’d orbit around!
Restaurant density (Restaurants per square kilometre, log scale)
Restaurant busyness (Restaurants per capita, log scale)
Finally, two maps of the restaurants of the Frankfurt area. Whenever you go somewhere, you need to know two things. First of all, how far will you have to walk to find something to eat, and secondly, how busy it will be when you get there. These maps answer those questions. The top one shows the number of restaurants, and the bottom one the number of restaurants per people.
Is this useful? Of course not. The data’s complete rubbish (zero churches in Gutleut, Bahnhofsviertel or Sachsenhausen? This is what happens when you get your data from a wiki) and the statistics are cackhandedly done (look at that massive blob in the south representing Frankfurt Flughafen, with its huge area but negligible population completely screwing everything up. Also, no keys or legends, ha ha!).
But it’s content, and that’s what counts for a blog, right?
Right?