NYC Taxi Space-Time Cube
Space-time cubeHägerstrand’s space-time cube: a million taxi samples stacked by timestamp into a 3D volume.
The classic of time geography: every pickup, en-route sample and dropoff from New Year’s morning 2015 is lifted to the altitude of its timestamp. Green pickup strata form at street level each minute, gold en-route threads climb between them (a steeper thread means slower traffic), and the night accumulates into a cube.
The wireframe boxes are the tiling system made visible: each box is one spatiotemporal tile — a spatial footprint crossed with a temporal bucket — drawn as it streams in. The squash slider flattens the cube back to a map. The same night also renders flat as an origin–destination heatmap.
stt-generate nyc-rideshare --download 2015-01 --max-trips 50000
Trips are routed through OSRM (OpenStreetMap road network). The processed OSRM graph is staged in stt:scripts/data-generation/osrm-data/ — start it with cd stt:scripts/data-generation && ./setup-osrm.sh run (Docker) before building.
Full recipes for every dataset live in the data-generation guide.