Fastest Commute: Cycling vs Public Transport Across London

The question: From a fixed home in North London, where is cycling faster than the tube or bus—and where does public transport still win? I queried the TFL Journey Planner API for morning-peak travel times to a dense grid of destinations and built interactive maps from the results.

Interactive results

Full-screen Leaflet visualisations (open in a new tab for the best experience):

• Where the bike is faster Green: cycling beats transit on door-to-door time.
• Side-by-side comparison Pair with the heatmaps to read both modes in context.
• Cycling travel times Time-to-destination by bike across the grid.
• Public transport travel times Same grid with tube, bus, and rail journeys.
• Cycling isochrones 10–90 minute bands from the origin.
• Transit isochrones Same isochrone cuts for public transport.

Method

A Python script walks the grid, throttles requests to stay under TFL rate limits, and stores every response in SQLite (fastest_commute/results/commute.db), including the raw API JSON—so a full re-run is never required to explore or re-visualise the data. The run is resumable after interruption: progress is tracked in the database, not a one-shot export.

The analysis pipeline, commands, and CSV export are documented in fastest_commute/README.md in this site's repository.

Why it's fun

Commute choices are usually anecdotal—your line, your office, this week's engineering works. A full-grid comparison turns that into a landscape: where the bike is genuinely competitive in the morning peak, and where the network still dominates. The maps are the point; the database is the receipt.

Data: Transport for London Journey Planner API