Fly Cab
2005
Fly Cab follows a single taxi in San Francisco over the course of five days at 2000x normal speed. As the cab travels, it leaves a trail that slowly falls below it.
I wrote Fly Cab in Processing in 2005. At the time it pulled a random five day period from an API with hundreds of cabs and thousands of hours of data. In 2021, I've ported it to p5.js and you can view two 15-year-old cab paths here: cab one and cab two.
In those paths, you'll see a lot of short downtown trips, longer expeditions across the bay and golden gate bridges, and many trips south to SFO and beyond. You'll also see GPS glitches and hiccups rendered as the cab shoots across the city or freezes in place. You can click/touch and drag to rotate the path.