Moves, acquired by Facebook this morning, automatically records any walking, cycling, and running you do every day. With a new export feature, your data can be downloaded in a range of formats. Naturally, the data is ripe for mapping.
This is what a year’s worth of my own activities look like:
PURPLE is biking, PINK is running, BLUE is walking --- View full screen
Organizing your data
Moves provides your data in several formats, but our focus will be on the GPX files as it takes advantage of the app’s smart activity filtering, separating walking, running, cycling, flying, and driving.
I was only interested in my physical activities, so I took the full data sets for cycling.gpx, running.gpx, and walking.gpx and converted each to GeoJSON. I used our command line tool togeojson to do this:
Import and Design in TileMill
After converting those data sets that I’m interested in to GeoJSON, it’s straightforward to import into TileMill for styling following the same method of importing a shape file and subsequently styling the lines.
After importing the three GeoJSON tracks, my style.mss looked like this:
Note that there is no map background color — this is important as it will allow me to later composite the lines on top of another map.
Export
Following the instructions for exporting your map. As I sadly never left the country last year, I limited my map to the bounds of only the continental United States and zoom levels 1-12.
Upload and composite
The export will give you a nicely packaged MBTiles file. With this, go to your Data page and upload it to your account.
I created a new project with the data by clicking the big blue button, then added in to a darkened version of Mapbox’s satellite layer.
The end result
Washington, D.C., where I currently live
The final map was fun to see — namely, the patterns I inadvertently follow as I run, walk, and bike around cities that progressively become more familiar.
San Francisco, CA, where I explore often
Portland, OR
See the full map and start tracking your own data today with Moves, OpenPaths, PlaceMe, or any other fitness tracking app.