Field notes 4 MIN READ
Every way you have gone to work
Two fixed points and several hundred different routes between them. Layered, that is a map of a decision rather than of a journey.
A commute heatmap is a different object from a training heatmap, and better.
Two fixed points
A training heatmap radiates. Everything starts at one place and goes out, so the picture is a star: dark at the middle, spokes leaving.
A commute has two ends and both are fixed. Every route starts at one and finishes at the other, so the variations can only happen in the middle. Layered, that produces a lens — narrow at both ends, wide where the choices are.
Nothing else we draw has that shape.
What the width means
The wide part is where the decision lives.
If there is one obvious way, the lens is thin: a single dark line with a couple of pale strays. If the city offers three reasonable routes, there are three strands, and their relative darkness is a straightforward record of which one you actually prefer regardless of what you would say.
Roadworks show as a temporary strand that appears and stops. A house move shows as one end migrating. A change of job ends the whole thing, which is why this is also the print for leaving somewhere.
You need a lot of them
A hundred journeys before the strands separate. Below that it looks like one route with errors.
The good news is that a commute is the easiest activity to have hundreds of. Five years of riding to work is well over two thousand files, and a bulk export gets all of them at once.
The privacy case is at its sharpest
Home at one end, work at the other, timestamps on every one. That is a schedule as much as a map.
Both ends are trimmed before anything is drawn, and on a short route that removes a real fraction of the line — sometimes a quarter of it. That is the correct trade here, and it is why the radius cannot be set to zero.
What is left is the middle, which is the only part that was ever interesting.
What to put on it
The years as a span, and the two places if you are comfortable naming them. No distance.
Questions people actually ask
- How many commutes do I need?
- A hundred or so before the alternatives start to separate. Below that it reads as one route with a few strays.
- Why does it look like a fan?
- Because the two ends are fixed and the middle is not. Every variation diverges after the first junction and converges before the last, which produces a lens shape.
- Is this different from a normal heatmap?
- Yes. A normal heatmap radiates from one point; a commute heatmap connects two, which is a different and rarer picture.
- How is privacy handled here?
- Both ends are trimmed before anything is drawn, which on a short route removes a real fraction of the line. On a commute that is the point — both ends are places you are at predictably.
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