A-Map: Interactive Visual Exploration of Intercity Accessibility Dynamics Based on Railway Network Data

Railway transportation is closely linked to everyday lives while also aiding domain experts in analyzing national or regional development. However, discrepancies between travel time reduced by railways and actual distance pose challenges in visualizing the accessibility. Existing methods either struggle to simultaneously depict the accessibility relationships among all cities or disregard genuine geographical positions, leading to spatial cognitive confusion. In this work, we propose a novel approach to balance between the geographical positions and travel time between cities. We construct linear cartograms to represent accessibility while preserving better local railway network structures compared with existing methods. We further propose the A-Map system, enabling users to interactively explore the extensive development of China’s railway system over decades. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed layout algorithm from qualitative metric evaluation and illustrate the applicability of our system with results.